Vision Based Autonomous Path/Line Following of a Mobile Robot Using a Hybrid Fuzzy PID Controller

Abstract

In this work, we propose a method for autonomous path/line following of differential-drive wheeled robot to track straight and curved paths in an indoor environment. In order to follow the path/line, fuzzy logic techniques are applied to generate movement with the information extracted from vision system. The control method in the system combines a steering controller, which is implemented by an intelligent hybrid fuzzy PID controller, controlling the steering angle of the robot, and fuzzy velocity controller, which controls the forward linear velocity with the purpose of safe tracking. We do experiments using an open source differential-drive wheeled robot platform (Figure 1). In the experiments, the robot is successfully able to follow a pre-defined path/line containing both straight and curved sections. The effectiveness of the control algorithm, combining steering and velocity controllers, is examined in these experiments.