Development of a remote-controlled mobile robot with binocular vision for environment monitoring

A mobile robot will play important role in many fields, such as radiation detecting in nuclear power plant, unknown environment exploration, disaster rescue for emergency response, and so on. This paper developed a remote-controlled mobile robot for environment monitoring. It is composed of a mobile platform, multiple sensors, a mission planner, an embedded controller and a wireless communication module. The mobile platform is a wheeled mechanism driven by two motors. The sensors include two wireless cameras and an inertia measurement unit consisting of gyroscope, accelerator and magnetometer. The former provides inspection images, which can also be further processed for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The latter provides the inertia acceleration, attitude and azimuth measurement of the robot itself. The mission planning and motor control algorithms are respectively realized in a personal computer (PC) and an ARM microprocessor (embedded controller). They communicate with each other through the wireless communication link. The PC also received the inspection images of the cameras through WIFI. At last, the robot prototype was manufactured and experimented. Experiment results of typical cases verified its flexibility and reliability.