TJPRO-AVR: A Wireless Enabled Mobile Robot for Vision Research

Abstract

In this paper we describe a vision system based on combining a mobile autonomous robot with wireless links to a host PC running MATLAB ™. The TJPro-Avr ™ consists of a mobile robot platform with 2 motors, a battery pack, IR sensors and an Atmel 8-bit AVR microcontroller, the ATmega128, for control. We have expanded the basic TJ Pro-Avr ™ for these experiments by adding a wireless serial link and a wireless camera. With this platform we have performed several basic robot behaviors. 1. Object Avoidance using structured light. 2. Object detection and avoidance using motion and object detection. 3. Object tracking and interception using color differentiation. Our objective in using these simple vision algorithms is to demonstrate how our mobile robot platform, in conjunction with MATLAB, permits mathematically sophisticated complex processing of real-time mobile robot sensor data with a user-friendly interface at an affordable cost. Our choosing of a color detection algorithm as one of the experiments allows us to compare our current platform with an on-board PDA doing the vision processing. That approach was detailed in our 2002 paper: “PDA Based Real-Time Vision for a Small Autonomous Mobile Robot”[10]