Image tracking for wheeled mobile robots

This paper is concerned with the control of a novel wheeled mobile robot using a FPGA-based proportional-plus-integral-plus-derivative theory and the image tracking technique. The structure of the manipulator contains a wheeled mobile robot, a multi-link robot, several motors, interface circuits, infrared sensors, and drivers. All these components cooperated to make the transport of the refreshments a success in the restaurant building. The main chips of the wheeled mobile robot and the remote control system are Altera EPM1270T144C5 and EPM3064ALC44-10 respectively. We successfully implement an autonomous wheeled mobile robot by the proposed controller. Moreover, to illustrate the effectiveness of the finished product, we set a movement which contains tray-carrying, autonomous movement, and tray-placing. The autonomous movement was executed by PID controller. Furthermore, the image tracking system carried out the actions of tray-carrying and tray-placing. Simulation and Experimental results validated that the image tracking technique and PID scheme can be used well in the application of wheeled mobile robots.