Two-Vehicle Coordination System for Omnidirectional Transportation Based on Image Processing and Deviation Prediction

Omnidirectional mobile platform is essential due to its excellent mobility and versatility. With the development of the manufacturing industry, how to transport oversized or overweight goods has become a new problem. Compared with manufacturing omnidirectional mobile platforms with different specifications, it is more cost-effective and flexible to coordinate two non-physically connected omnidirectional platforms to transport overweight and oversized cargo. The roughness of the actual deployment environment and the mechanical deflection between the two vehicles have a significant impact on the normal operation of the system. This paper combines mechanical wheels, image processing algorithms and collaboration algorithms to create a novel and practical split-type omnidirectional mobile platform based on image deviation prediction for transporting oversized or overweighted goods. The proposed system collects raw measurements from a distance sensor and an image sensor, transmits them to a central processing unit through a wireless communication module and calculates and predicts the relative deflection between the two vehicles based on our derived mathematical model. This information is then fed to a Kalman filter and PID control algorithm to coordinate the two vehicles. The effectiveness and performance of our system have been thoroughly tested, which has already been applied in a bullet train production line.