An underwater pipeline tracking system for amphibious spherical robots

Abstract

Based on monocular camera, an underwater detection and tracking system for amphibious spherical robot is proposed to realize autonomous cruise of underwater pipelines. Firstly, according to the imaging characteristics of underwater image, the image of pipeline is detected by image binarization, edge detection and Hough transform. And then, the Kalman filter was carried out according to the edge information and the underwater pipeline was tracked. The control scheme of the visual system to the amphibious spherical robot was improved, and the tracking pipe motion of the amphibious robot is controlled by PID algorithm. Finally, we carried out some experiments under different scenes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed underwater pipeline tracking system, and the experimental results showed that the proposed underwater pipeline tracking algorithm has good robustness and real - time performance.