Harmony search path detection for vision based automated guided vehicle

Efficient, cost effective, and fast automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are getting more an more attention day by day. Giant industries and huge businesses has already adopted the AGV technology to boost their profits. In order to make the AGVs more affordable for medium or small businesses, manufacturing costs must be reduced. A line follower AGV is a cost effective solution among the others. A line follower usually follows a painted line on the floor that guides it to its destination. Line followers generally avoid high cost line detection algorithms because of limited computational power. As the processors getting faster, cheaper, and smaller the question arises: is it possible to utilize costly algorithms such as evolutionary algorithms in such a real-time application? In this paper, a novel technique is presented for applying harmony search evolutionary algorithm in real-time line detection vision based and the idea was implemented using a two wheeled robotic platform. Proposed robot detects and follows the path with high levels of accuracy, without the need for edge detection and independent of image resolution.