A Study on Object Detection and Tracking of a Mobile Robot Using CIE L^* a^* b^* Color Space

Autonomous vehicles are increasingly used in daily life and industrial applications. Mobile robot technologies lead to autonomous architectures in these areas. The path planning methods of mobile robots contain differences in the purpose they realize. This trajectory planning from a determined starting point to the target point brings many techniques from image processing to artificial intelligence. In the study, an application with a unique design has been carried out on the tracking of circular objects with different diameters and colors by a mobile robot. Moving object is detected with CIE L^* a^* b^* color space with RGB-D camera by utilizing the ROS server-client architecture. The mobile robot tracks the detected object at a certain distance at a constant speed. Image filtering parameters are processed by the mobile robot in the Matlab environment together with the publisher-subscriber parameters. Thus, two circular objects with different colors, detected because of image processing and determined beforehand, are continuously followed by the mobile robot at a certain speed. Experiments were carried out using different diameter, size tolerance and color parameters in the image depending on the CIE L^* a^* b^* color space.