A Low Cost Vision Based Hybrid Fiducial Mark Tracking Technique for Mobile Industrial Robots

The field of robotic vision is developing rapidly. Robots can react intelligently and provide assistance to user activities through sentient computing. Since industrial applications pose complex requirements that cannot be handled by humans, an efficient low cost and robust technique is required for the tracking of mobile industrial robots. The existing sensor based techniques for mobile robot tracking are expensive and complex to deploy, configure and maintain. Also some of them demand dedicated and often expensive hardware. This paper presents a low cost vision based technique called “Hybrid Fiducial Mark Tracking” (HFMT) technique for tracking mobile industrial robot. HFMT technique requires off-the-shelf hardware (CCD cameras) and printable 2-D circular marks used as fiducials for tracking a mobile industrial robot on a pre-defined path. This proposed technique allows the robot to track on a predefined path by using fiducials for the detection of Right and Left turns on the path and White Strip for tracking the path. The HFMT technique is implemented and tested on an indoor mobile robot at our laboratory. Experimental results from robot navigating in real environments have confirmed that our approach is simple and robust and can be adopted in any hostile industrial environment where humans are unable to work.