Design of a Vision-based Mobile Robot with Leg-caterpillar-convertible Capability

• Main Authors: Chang, Po-Chun, 張博淳
• Other Authors: Cheng, Chih-Yung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/11377626484430824521

碩士 === 國立臺灣海洋大學 === 電機工程學系 === 103 === The thesis proposes a mobile robot which can switch between the caterpillar track and the hexapod modes. The caterpillar track vehicle can cope with uneven or rugged surfaces and the leg-type mechanism will be flexible in walking strides. For the robot mechanism, preliminary design was conducted in SolidWorks and the drawings were sent to the 3D printer or CNC machine to produce prototypes. The six-leg formation uses 18 servo motors which were selected according to their positions and functionalities. The caterpillar track was actuated by high-torque motors which can rotate freely. The supporting mechanism was designed differently and adjusted to their different movements. For the robot control, Arduino Mega 2560 control board is the key to coordinate and integrate sensor and motor components. The robot vision is developed in the Visual Studio with OpenCV libraries. Through the web camera and computer, the RGB image is captured and processed to get the centroid of the target image, which will be sent to the control board via Bluetooth interface. A gyro is also equipped in order to get the attitude information for robot balance. Finally, some simple tasks were performed to test the feasibility of this framework.