An embedded vision-based tracking system for autonomous robot navigation

In this paper, a prototype of an autonomous vehicle with an FPGA based computing system is described. It uses an ultrasonic sensor and a camera as sources of information about the surrounding environment. The vehicle is able to track an object selected by the operator (it does not need to be defined a-priori). In the proposed solution, the mean-shift algorithm is used. It has been adapted to operate in a pipeline, real-time vision system. The control unit is built of two PD controllers which determine the PWM ratio for the left and right DC drive. The whole system has been implemented on the Atlys development board with Spartan 6 FPGA device from Xilinx.