Automation of industrial vehicles: A vision-based line tracking application

This paper presents some intermediate results of a research project regarding with auto-guided vehicles (AGVs) and vision-based guidance. The paper describes three different degrees of autonomy, form the basic one to the full autonomous one. In particular, the paper focuses on the intermediate degree of autonomy, named as ¿guided¿ driving, which includes several types of application under the same approach such as manual-assisted driving, teleoperated driving and a vision-based line tracking application. The paper describes on the line-tracking problem with AGVs where a simple and robust line detection algorithm has been described and implemented on an embedded vision system. It also describes a line tracking control algorithm, which has been validated through experimental and simulation data. Finally, the paper discusses future work in the context of the project.