Abstract:

To meet the requirements of a hospital inspection robot for image collection and transmission, an image acquisition and transmission system based on WLAN was designed and developed. A method of combining an embedded device and industrial control computer was proposed to decrease the calculation burden of a robot. The embedded device was responsible for image acquisition and compression, and the industrial control computer completed transmission. The occupancy ratio of the network bandwidth was effectively reduced by applying the algorithm of JPEG. A communication protocol based on UDP was designed. It made image transmission quick and steady in the WLAN. The improved parallel transmission increased the real-time ability by applying multithreading technology. Experiments demonstrated that the system of image capture and transmission for the hospital inspection robot had high stability and real-time ability, which could complete the task of capturing the image of the environment and transmission when the hospital inspection robot visited wards.

Key words: hospital, inspection robot, TMS320DM642, image acquisition, image compression, real-time transmission