Evaluation of an object recognition algorithm on the Volksbot platform

Nowadays perception is still an up-to-date scienti fic issue on a mobile robot system. This thesis introduces an approach on how to recognize objects, namely numbers, using a digital camera on a Volksbot robot. The robot used in this thesis has been specifi cally designed for the SICK robot day. The development of the vision algorithm was done in two stages: the region of interest detection and the actual number recognition. Diff erent algorithms had been tested and evaluated and the Canny edge detector with contour finding has been proven to be the best choice for the region of interest detection and the Tesseract OCR engine was the best decision for number recognition. To integrate the vision component on an existing robot system, ROS was used. This thesis also discusses the integration of the EPOS motor controller into ROS.