A mobile robotic platform capable of stereo vision based on blod detection

Abstract

In robotics, vision is an indispensable tool. It is used for a wide spectrum of applications, such as Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), object recognition and communication. Vision is expensive both in terms of hardware (cameras with sufficient image quality, CPU/memory to analyze the images fast enough) and software (need for efficient algorithms). For this reason, robot with advanced vision capabilities are tipically custom-build and expensive. This is particularly true for stereo vision, which has lots of potential. Nevertheless, its use is severely limited by the discussed hardware and software costs. These issues make it difficult to build cheap robots that can achieve stereo vision. A field in which this is one of the main problems is collective robotics, in which the cost of each individual unit is a huge driver in the feasibility of a robot system. Motivated by the above considerations, this work provides the first design of a cheap, affordable robot capable of stereo vision. This work is a part of a bigger project which has additional considerations. In this bigger project, only objects with a set of fixed features are considered interesting for the robot. These objects are single-color objects (although each object can have a different color) and spherical shape. These last considerations lead to the necessity of a color-detection system and three-dimensional position reconstruction based only on spherical targets. The objectives of this work were to create a mobile robotic platform with the discussed capabilities. The platform has been designed and built so that the software and the integration of the hardware modules can be tested. The work described in this document includes both the hardware and the software design and implementation. It presents an innovative way of reconstructing a three-dimensional scene, that is based on color blob-detection. It also provides information about the motion system and the distributed control of the platform. The integration of all the modules has been tested.