Vision-Sensing-Based Mobile Robot

Today, there are different types of autonomous robots. Some of them have had a major impact on our lives, such as industrial and medical robots. Others are for military use, such as drones and pet robots just for fun. The key difference between such robots and controlled robots is their ability to move on their own and make decisions based on observations of the world around them. Mobile robots must have a source of data used as an input dataset and processed to change their behavior; for example, move, stop, rotate, or perform any desired action based on information gathered from the surrounding environment. Different types of sensors are used to provide data to the robot controller. Such data sources can be ultrasonic sensors, laser sensors, torque sensors or vision sensors. Robots with integrated cameras are becoming an important research area. They have recently attracted a great deal of attention from researchers, and it is widely used in healthcare, manufacturing, and many other service areas. Robots need a controller with a robust implementation mechanism to process this incoming data.

Mobile robotics is currently one of the fastest growing areas of scientific research topics. Thanks to their skills, robots have replaced humans in many fields. Autonomous robots can move, determine actions, and perform tasks without any human intervention. The mobile robot consists of several parts with different technologies which allow the robot to perform the required tasks. The main subsystems are sensors, motion systems, navigation and positioning systems. The local navigation type of mobile robots are linked with sensors that give information about the extrinsic environment, which assist the automaton in creating a map of that location and localizing itself. A camera (or vision sensor) is a better substitution for the sensors. The incoming data is visual information in image format, which is processed and analyzed by the controller algorithm, converting it into useful data for performing the requested task. Mobile robots based on visual sensing are intended for indoor environments. Robots with cameras can do their jobs more accurately than other sensor-based robots.