Design of a Vision Based Autonomous Turret

This article describes the hardware and software design of a vision-based autonomous turret system. A two degree of freedom (2 DOF) turret platform is designed to carry a canon equipped with an embedded camera and actuated by stepper motors or direct current motors. The turret system includes a central calculator running a visual detection and tracking solution, and a microcontroller, responsible for actuators control. The Tracking-Learning-Detection (TLD) algorithm is implemented for target detection and tracking. Furthermore, a Kalman filter algorithm is implemented to continue the tracking in case of occlusion. The performances of the designed turret, regarding response time, accuracy and the execution time of its main tasks, are evaluated. In addition, an experimental scenario was performed for real-time autonomous detection and tracking of a moving target.