Autonomous Mobile Robot Platform for On-the-road Navigation

This paper presents a mechatronic development of a new mobile robot platform for autonomous on-the-road navigation. It uses sensor fusion involving the camera, laser range finder (LRF) and odometry to guide and find the free collision path during navigation. The embedded controller system has been deliberately developed to integrate the mechanical parts with the electronics and software algorithms Microsoft Visual C# and MATLAB are linked together to perform the road recognition calculation via the proposed algorithms. The main processing program in C# is later extended to MATLAB environment for image, signal processing and calculation based on data from the LRF and camera. The linking between C# and MATLAB is done using COM automation server and the data in the client C# program passes it to MATLAB and vice versa.