Wide-range trajectory measurement using CCD camera for small mobile robots

This paper describes a new trajectory measurement system for small mobile robots. Wheeled robots such as automatically guided vehicles generally use the dead reckoning method to move to a desired position. In order to improve on the dead reckoning method, a trajectory measurement device which can measure the positional and directional errors with high accuracy is required. The authors made a measurement system using a CCD camera which tracks the vehicle automatically. In this paper, after briefly describing the outline of this measurement system, a calibration method to reduce the measurement error in wide measurement area and a tracking method which enables the system to track the vehicle moving at high speed without losing its image are proposed. Some experiments to measure the actual path of a small vehicle were carried out and it was confirmed that the measurement system has enough capability of detecting the trajectory error