Autonomous mobile target tracking system based on grey-fuzzy control algorithm

This paper presents a new position-based tracking system for autonomous mobile target tracking task. A grey-fuzzy controller (GFC) is developed for motion control of the tracker, in which dynamics models of the target and tracker are not required a priori. The target detection is based on the adaptive visual detector (AVD), which can online adjust the histogram model based on the change of surrounding conditions, such as light variation, in a natural environment. The AVD and GFC are integrated together for mobile target-tracking applications. There are several advantages of the integrated system, in particular: (1) it can rapidly learn the target appearance model for the detection involved with the tracking task; (2) the temporal dynamics model of the target motion can be approximated for the predictive localization of the moving target; and (3) the system can deal with the uncertain environmental conditions to ensure the tracking performance by GFC. Three mobile robots in the authors´ laboratory have been used to demonstrate the success of this integrated system experimentally. They also conduct target tracking experiments, in which Chung Cheng-I tracks various moving targets. The results demonstrate the robustness and flexibility of the overall system in dealing with mobile target-tracking problems under varied natural environment conditions