An Image Acquiring, Processing and Transfer System over Bluetooth for an Educational Robotic Platform

Abstract

This paper describes a simple low-cost solution for image acquisition by means of a wireless wide-band communication. In order to provide the capability of transporting images in real time, the novelty resides in the image transfer system over Bluetooth that has been developed to allow machine vision. This work is a part of an ampler project; the development of an educational rover equipped with a robotic arm called VANTER, Spanish acronymous of «Non Crewed Autonomous Vehicle Specialized in Recognition». It is a prototype being developed by the authors of this work and it is aimed to work in automatized and guided mode. The primary motivation for this work come up from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Computer Systems and Automatic at the University of Huelva (Spain). The main goal is to build a general purpose robotic platform in order to develop, practice and test remote control strategies, signal acquisition and machine vision for educational purposes. The research group of this work has introduced several new developments to the prototype and the process has been divided in several phases of design, assembling and hardware programming. Firstly it implies the implementation of a platform fitted up with traction DC motors and position sensors, a robotic handle arm with several free degrees, a master-slave microcontrollers' network based on the I2C bus, a point-to-point UHF communication for telecommands & telemetry data, and finally a virtual interface to control an image acquiring, processing and transfer system over Bluetooth.