PDA Based Real-Time Vision for a Small Autonomous Mobile Robot

In this paper the authors describe a vision system based on combining a mobile autonomous robot and a hand-held Personal Data Assistant (PDA). All computation for control of the robot and vision are done on the robot and PDA. The TJ Pro can be outfitted with a HandSpring PDA and a digital camera to create a powerful vision equipped robot. Previously, outfitting a robot with vision required a large platform or off-robot computing power. With the vision and processing power of PDAs, low cost Mekatronix robots can perform complex vision functions at a fraction of the cost of current robots.