Neural Network Controller Application on a Visual based Object Tracking and Following Robot

Abstract

Navigation is the main issue for autonomous mobile robot due to its mobility in an unstructured environment. The autonomous object tracking and following robot has been applied in many places such as transport robot in industry and hospital, and as an entertainment robot. This kind of image processing based navigation requires more resources for computational time, however microcontroller currently applied to a robot has limited memory. Therefore, effective image processing from a vision sensor and obstacle avoidances from distance sensors need to be processed efficiently. The application of neural network can be an alternative to get a faster trajectory generation. This paper proposes a simple image processing and combines image processing result with distance information to the obstacles from distance sensors. The combination is conducted by the neural network to get the effective control input for robot motion in navigating through its assigned environment. The robot is deployed in three different environmental setting to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the robot can navigate itself effectively within reasonable time periods.