Robotic Traffic Cone System for Lane Closure using Computer Vision and Decentralized PID Control

• Angelo Casas Saldaña UTEC
• Manuel Martínez Campos UTEC
• Daniela Zavala Gutierrez UTEC
• Elvis J. Alegria UTEC

Abstract

The manual placement of traffic cones increases the risk of accidents for road workers due to vehicle collisions. This paper proposes a system of cone-shaped robots that automatically position themselves to gradually close a lane. Image segmentation and Hough transform, with a neural networks model to correct position distortion, are proposed to estimate the position of each robot. Additionally, to implement decentralized PID control, the current position and orientation is determined by a Kalman filter in conjunction with an embedded gyroscope and the motor’s incremental encoders. Validation was conducted using three robots within a controlled, scaled-down environment.

Keywords: Robust control, PI control, Robot vision systems, Transforms, Distortion, Cameras, Safety, PD control, Collision avoidance, Robots, Differential robot, PID control, computer vision, robot-cones