Semi-autonomous control of a wheeled mobile service robot using a rate gyro and a CCD camera

This paper develops methodologies and techniques for semi-autonomous control of a wheeled service robot with a gyro rate and a CCD camera. A mechatronic design approach is used to construct a wheeled service robot vehicle that performs missions at any indoor flat environments. A remote manual control technique is developed using a joystick. Using a rate gyro and a CCD camera, four user-friendly semi-autonomous control operations are proposed to steer the vehicle easily and effectively. Several experiments results are conducted to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed methods.