Control of a line following robot based on FSM estimation

Abstract

Line following robots are becoming increasingly popular both in industrial and in domestic applications. In these real world environments, noisy or inaccurate measurements lead to ambiguous conclusions about the robot’s state relative to the path. In this paper, a Finite State Machine is introduced that detects irregularities in the measurements from an array of reflectance sensors. Based on the estimated state, the FSM switches between a proposed variable-gain PD controller for line following and an open loop controller for handling special cases. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach reduces considerably the amount of errors caused by noisy measurements and improves the performance of the line following robot compared to a similar approach from the literature.