Design and Development of a Mobile Robot for Implementing Obstacle Avoidance Techniques Based on Fuzzy Logic and Vision

This article presents the mechanical design process of a mobile robot which is named TL-PR. Two separate algorithms are applied for obstacle avoidance purpose which are experimentally implemented on the proposed robot. The control board Arduino which is used for the under study robot is an open source board. In order to receive the images which are used for obstacle detecting and obstacle avoidance a Kinect sensor is installed in the proposed robot. The structure of TL-PR is a creative, simple and low cost structure. Two methods are used for obstacle avoidance which are implemented on the proposed robot. The first one is based on ultrasonic sensor. Five ultrasonic sensors are set around the proposed robot structure. The fuzzy control is used to manage the output data of the ultrasonic sensors and the rules of the fuzzy control are set on the MATLAB software. The second method which is used for obstacle detection and avoidance is based on image processing algorithm. A Kinect sensor is set on the top of the robot structure which is used for image processing for detecting the obstacles. The second method consists in processing the Visual Studio software and it run based on the OpenCV library. The proposed robot is a desirable platform for the @home robots. The laptop which is set on the robot made the robot compatible for implementing the various control and image processing algorithms.