A Novel Visual Lane Line Detection System for a NMPC-based Path Following Control Scheme

Tracking a visual path to perform image-based control requires additional processing to extract valuable information even in the presence of inconveniences, such as failures or deformation in the lane line or even restrictive environmental conditions. Dealing with faulty in the path to be followed, non-homogeneous floors and bad lighting condition are some of the difficulties encountered that compromise the accurate of feature extraction and consequently the controller effectiveness. In this paper, a novel visual system is proposed to detect and extract useful lane line parameters and to use them in a NMPC-based Visual Path Following Control Scheme. To cope with the above-mentioned problems, the visual path is approximated by a quadratic function and to robustness improve, this novel algorithm was modified to use RANSAC as a model estimation approach instead of using the classical Least Square Method. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system with respect to two others, in environments with visual disturbance, faulty paths, noise and bad lighting conditions.