Developing docking system for mobile robots with aruco markers

Robots are used to increase efficiency, speed and safety in many areas such as industrial warehouses, logistics companies, agricultural enterprises. With the development of technology, robots have started to perform not only fixed tasks such as welding and assembly, but also mobile tasks such as carrying loads between stations. While performing mobile tasks, they mostly use methods such as following a line drawn on the ground or tracing metal plates on the ground. In these methods, they experience problems such as the change of stations and the deformation of tracking traces in active areas. While autonomous robots are performing mobile tasks, they do the docking process with the distance, infrared and inductive sensors on it. There are some problems when approaching robots due to incorrect data coming from these sensors or incorrect processing of incoming data. To eliminate these negativities, cameras and pointers are used in modern robots. In this study, it's aimed to develop algortihms using arUco virtual pointers and camera view for docking mobile robots to the station. Firstly, the pointers size has been tested and calibrated for camera with different field of view. The develop algorithm has been tested for different scenarios in a laboratory environment using Robotino mobile robot. With the realized applications, the advantages of the docking algorithm using virtual pointers compared to the methods using basic sensors are shown.