Obstacle tracker and follower robot using Image Processing
Published on 20 May 2022. Written by Naveen Lakkundi
With advancement in robotic systems towards being autonomous surveillance robots the need for more smart thinking robots has become very essential. One of the aspects of tracking an object from its visuals has been taken up in this project Object Tracker and Follower Robot. In essence this project clubs in image processing and driving a robot autonomously with what visuals have been caught as has been in the case of Machine Vision projects.
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This project will be using a Raspberry Pi processor board for computational purpose and driving of the robot. The camera attached to the system captures the images of the front of the robot where it is attached. By monitoring a stream of incoming images the robot is able to autonomously decide to proceed in which direction it should go. The incoming visuals are processed using image processing techniques. Through the use of image processing, the coordinates of the target are recognized by the robot following which it follows a path to get to the target.
In this project we have demonstrated this ability of the robot by using a yellow colored Smiley face ball. Whenever a ball is placed in front of the robot it recognizes the ball shape and color and estimates by this about what direction is it from its current location and also an approximated distance from the ball. With these calculations, it proceeds towards the ball and stops at a location near the ball. This project demonstrates the capability of robots having target tracking capabilities autonomously with the help of image processing and robot driving by the results of image processing. The robot can follow the object even when the object is moving at a speed which can be tracked. In this way with the help of advanced technology the Object tracker and follower robot can achieve object tracking autonomously.
Project Description:
Raspberry Pi 3 B: Raspberry Pi is a Microprocessor which has 40 pins with 27 GPIO pins, it has a 1 Giga Bytes of RAM and a SD card slot for the storage or the ROM,it can be used as a mini computer for low computing operations, it has a dual band LAN, faster Ethernet, Bluetooth, it also has USB and HDMI ports for connecting devices. This device can be used as a server which we are doing in this project.
Micro SD card: You will need a minimum of 8 gigabytes SD card for this project, this SD card is used as the ROM of the raspberry pi. Use 32 Gigabyte or 64 Gigabytes of
PI TFT Touchscreen: Use a TFT Touchscreen display module which is specified only for Pi.
L293D Motor Driver: You need motor drivers to drive the motors, as the microcontroller only works on 5V, it can only give signals to the motor but the motor needs more than 5V to run this is why we use motor drivers.
DC motors: Use DC motors to actuate the robots.
Robot Chassis: Use strong chassis which can hold some serious weight, you will need one chassis for master and one for each slave.
Li-Po battery: Raspberry Pi needs a power supply of 5V and 2A and Li-Po battery can be used for the power supply. Use 2500mAh li-po battery.
Mouse and keyboard: You will need this to control, monitor, and to configure the Pi.
Pi Camera: Use the Pi camera to capture still images, live streaming and for video recording.
Ultrasonic sensor: The Ultrasonic sensor use Ultrasonic sound waves to detect the distance beween the sensor and the obstacle.
RF Transmitter module: This module has an encoder which helps in converting the data from parallel to serial communication data format and this data is then transmitted using radio frequency.
RF Receiver module: This module has a decoder in it and the received data is decoded so that Arduino can understand the data received.
Project Implementation:
Install the Raspbian OS into the SD card, and boot the Raspberry Pi.
Install Python IDE 3 in Raspberry Pi.
Connect the Pi camera and enable the camera option in the settings.
Download the OpenCV software for the Pi camera and run it in the daemon mode.
Write a shell script to execute the commands in the terminal for object detection, checking the live streaming and recording when there is obstacle.
Write a python program with which you can take a picture and also track the object detected, you can also take a video object is detected. The robot has to keep a minimum distance gap between the sensor and the object, so if the object moves forward or backward the robot should also move in order to follow or track it.
You can control the robot through the transmitter or the controller from a radius of two kilometers.
Project Brief:The Raspberry Pi when configured and all the required software has been installed then the Pi is ready to be used as an object tracker and record the video of the object movement.
Software requirements:
Raspbian OS(Debian Linux): Raspbian operating systems are based on Linux, Raspberry pi are also compatible with Windows and IOS but prefer any Linux based OS
Python IDE 3: Python IDE 3 is compiler where you can write and compile python program.
Programing Language:
Linux (terminal commands)
Python
Kit required to develop Obstacle tracker and follower robot using Image Processing:
