A Perceptive Mannequin Flag Operator

摘要

In road construction, in particular on a bustling highway, an operator is needed to alert the drivers to decelerate the speeding vehicles. In doing so, an operator is asked to stand at a safe place, some distance from the construction site and to wave a small flag. Although the flag is light, prolonged waving flag cause tiredness to the operator. If the operator stops shaking, the safety of his co-workers is at risk. It is a straightforward thinking that replacing a human operator with a robot operator is a good choice while keeping the human-like figure. The presence of a human figure effectively alerts the drivers as compared to object signs or signal lights. This paper presents a robotic, human-like figure that performs a simple one axis controlled flag waving task. It comes with a monocular vision that video streams the oncoming vehicles. A program is written in Python language with SimpleCV module that processes the video data. A signal is sent to the controller upon detecting the approaching vehicles. As a result, the robot operator would move its arm, thus waving a flag as a warning signal. A pneumatically powered actuator drives the arm. The robot operator was tested in a controlled environment where the results showed that it has a potential for field implementation.