The visual detection and steering of medical autonomous vehicles

The paper presents initial research on method, which improves precise indoor localization and steering of autonomous mobile devices that can be used for medical applications like: patient’s state monitoring, medicine distribution or environmental data collection before medical intervention (in case of biohazard or fire). The localization of object is based on optical codes, which are modified to be easily identified from distance in low light. Multiple codes modification was tested to find optimal ones. The visual recognition system is using Hough transform and Canny edge detection to read values from code. The novelty of the proposed method is reading values directly from image, without scaling and rotation. Moreover, the steering algorithm for identified device is proposed. It takes distance and decision uncertainty under consideration. The proposed method was verified against state-of-the-art optical codes in real-world indoor environment. Finally, the further research directions are discussed.