Development and Investigation of Vision System for a Small-Sized Mobile Humanoid Robot in a Smart Environment

Abstract

The conducted research aims to develop a computer vision system for a small-sized mobile humanoid robot. The decentralization of the servomotor control and the computer vision systems is investigated based on the hardware solution point of view, moreover, the required software level to achieve an efficient matched design is obtained. A computer vision system using the upgraded tiny-You Only Look Once (YOLO) network model is developed to allow recognizing and identifying objects and making decisions on interacting with them, which is recommended for crowd environment. During the research, a concept of a computer vision system was developed, which describes the interaction between the main elements, on the basis of which hardware modules were selected to implement the task. A structure of information interaction between hardware modules is proposed, and a connection scheme is developed, on the basis of which a model of a computer vision system is assembled for research, with the required algorithmic and software for solving the problem. To ensure the high speed of the computer vision system based on the ESP32-CAM module, the neural network was improved by replacing the Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG-16) network as the base network for extracting the functions of the Single Shot Detector (SSD) network model with the tiny-YOLO lightweight network model, which made it possible to preserve the multidimensional structure of the network model feature graph, resulting in increasing the detection accuracy, while significantly reducing the amount of calculations generated by the network operation, thereby significantly increasing the detection speed, due to a limited set of objects. Finally, a number of experiments were carried out, both in static and dynamic environments, which showed a high accuracy of identifications.