An integrative approach for path planning and tracking of a shape-aware mobile robot in structured environment using vision sensor

Abstract

A shape-aware path planning algorithm is necessary for real-time execution of a task by a mobile robot whereas path planning algorithms available in literature consider mobile robot as a point object. Current work proposes a shape-aware A* path planning approach with a heuristic function to accommodate the shape of mobile robot. In this paper, the detection, tracking and control of the robot has been carried out for the mobile robot while performing a task in a structured environment. For the implementation and validation, an overhead camera is used to capture the images of obstacles in the task space and published in ROS platform. The captured images are also processed using OpenCV software for detection and tracking using Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) and Kalman filter algorithms for different test scenarios. The proposed approach accurately detects and tracks the shape aware mobile robot with percentage error ranging from 6%-10% in different cases.