Development of an Omnidirectional Mobile Robot Using Embedded Color Vision System for Ball Following

Abstract

In this paper, three Omni-wheels mobile robot is developed by using a low cost embedded color vision system (CMUcam5 Pixy) for tracking and following a ball. The ball detection is done by distinguish its colour from the environment. A suitable design, of the robot is offered considering a number of practical factors. CMUcam5 Pixy gives the robot the ability to detect many of multi coloured objects at the same time. The robot motion is controlled due to the kinematics analysis and the path planning. The velocity PI algorithm is used to control the robot wheels’ speeds. The robot sensors (i.e. CMUCAM 5 camera, and encoder) data are collected and processed then, transmitted to a laptop by the wireless communication. A Graphical user interface (GUI) is designed by using Matlab program in this project. This GUI is displaying the transmitted robot data such as the ball distance and the robot velocity in order to support studying the robot performance. The robot shows a positive performance after the demonstration. The designed robot can be used later for developing a self-located small sized RoboCup competition.