Distributed System for
Domestic Robot Operation Using Computer Vision
Marcel-Titus Marginean
D.Sc. in IT, DISSERTATION
Defense on 4/26/2016 at 12:00pm in YR459
Abstract:
This
dissertation research aims to study, propose, and start to develop an integrated
home automation (domotic) system in the form of an Intelligent House
infrastructure. We envision the model of the fully integrated Smart House of the
future as being a self-sufficient intelligent system able to take care of the
inhabitants, with the robots becoming just the autonomous mobile components of
the assisted living environment. So far Computer Vision (CV) seems to be the
most promising technology to allow robot navigation in domestic environments,
therefore a large part of the works is focusing on the aspects of using CV for
domestic robot operations and addressing challenges that come with it.
The
work began by proposing a distributed processing architecture for controlling a
robot operating in a domestic environment and navigating it using computer
vision. The system is composed of a set of fixed cameras mounted on the walls
near the ceiling overlooking the various rooms, a set of networked computers
located in the house, home automation devices communicating with domotic
computers and one or more mobile units (robots) having on board their own camera
and processing equipment. We are taking advantage of the already existing Wi-Fi
and wired networks in any modern house to provide the communication between
equipment and this allows us to keep the cost of the system within an affordable
range.
The
first task we handled on the Computer Vision side of work was to implement an
object tracking algorithm by fusing together multiple well knows CV operations
into a multi-paradigm tracker. The
MP-Tracker algorithm developed runs inside a Camera Module receiving images from
a fixed camera, detecting moving objects, and sending information about them to
other components in the system.
To tie
all the modules together, we developed a new communication protocol sDOMO
designed from the beginning as a protocol for domestic home automation and
robotic systems. A major area of concern for using robots and generally any
automation device in domestic environments is the security and privacy of the
inhabitants. To address this concern we designed sDOMO to implement a
self-sufficient home-centered automation network where the devices are able to
perform their duties over the house network and any access to the outside world
would be strictly controlled. The protocol has multiple layers of security and
privacy protection and is being offered as an open source project for general
purpose home automation and building of robotic systems.
To be
able to test the system we built from scratch a small domestic robot powered by
a Raspberry PI 2 embedded computer board and an Arduino-Nano micro-controller to
access the hardware in real-time. The robot is based on a differential drive
platform with two DC motors commanded by Arduino via H-Bridges circuits. The
robot Camera is mounted on a Pan-Tilt mechanism powered by two servo-motors. The
embedded computer board is running the ARM software communicating with the rest
of the system via sDOMO on Wi-Fi network. Current dissertation provides most of
the information required for our robot to be replicated by other researchers.