FPGA-Based Real-Time Color Tracking for Robotic Formation Control

In construction automation, the tracking of worker location or a moving object is important for labor monitoring, resource management, and machine coordination. For object tracking, a camera is often utilized to obtain information of construction vehicle motion which can then be employed in coordination controls. Real-time tracking of autonomous vehicles, particularly for the control of multiple targets in formations, still suffers from constraints imposed in computation resources. Here the field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology is applied in a prototypical tracking system for vehicles by using a CMOS camera to detect their color-tags. The raw image from the Bayer color pattern is used to indicate the 2-dimensional position of vehicles and encrypted infrared commands are issued to deploy them in a leader-follower formation. It is shown that the novel system-on-programmable-chip with parallel control cores design can efficiently handle color recognition and multi-vehicle control while significantly reduces memory requirement and computation time.