An image-based vehicle guidance system

An image-based vehicle guidance design is proposed in this paper. Instead of using the positioning information from a GPS receiver, in this study we propose an image monitoring based approach to provide guidance signal. An object's positioning data is known to be extracted from its image signals taken by a camera. Based on such knowledge, a two-camera based platform is built for vehicle guidance. This is achieved by three major efforts proposed in the study. One is the design of autopilot function for the target vehicle, so that the motion of the vehicle can be controlled through the wire. The second one is to fetch the positioning data of the target in a given test environment, which then need to be transformed and compared with the given route information. A set of fuzzy-like rules is then developed to serve as guidance control scheme to drive the target vehicle to track the given route. Experimental results were obtained for the so-called "free-go" motion and the circular motion around a given circle. The tracking errors of the two studies are found to be small and within an acceptable range, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.