A Distributed Vision-Based Navigation System for Khepera IV Mobile Robots

This work presents the development and implementation of a distributed navigation system based on object recognition algorithms. The main goal is to introduce advanced algorithms for image processing and artificial intelligence techniques for teaching control of mobile robots. The autonomous system consists of a wheeled mobile robot with an integrated color camera. The robot navigates through a laboratory scenario where the track and several traffic signals must be detected and recognized by using the images acquired with its on-board camera. The images are sent to a computer server that performs a computer vision algorithm to recognize the objects. The computer calculates the corresponding speeds of the robot according to the object detected. The speeds are sent back to the robot, which acts to carry out the corresponding manoeuvre. Three different algorithms have been tested in simulation and a practical mobile robot laboratory. The results show an average of 84% success rate for object recognition in experiments with the real mobile robot platform.