An Object Detection and Localization Method Based on Improved YOLOv5 for the Teleoperated Robot

Abstract

In the traditional teleoperation system, the operator locates the object using the real-time scene information sent back from the robot terminal; however, the localization accuracy is poor and the execution efficiency is low. To address the issues, we propose an object detection and localization method for the teleoperated robot. First, we improved the classic YOLOv5 network model to produce superior object detection performance and named the improved model YOLOv5_Tel. On the basis of the classic YOLOv5 network model, the feature pyramid network was changed to a bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) network module to achieve the weighted feature fusion mechanism. The coordinate attention (CA) module was added to make the model pay more attention to the features of interest. Furthermore, we pruned the model from the depth and width to make it more lightweight and changed the bounding box regression loss function GIOU to SIOU to speed up model convergence. Then, the YOLOv5_Tel model and ZED2 depth camera were used to achieve object localization based on the binocular stereo vision ranging principle. Finally, we established an object detection platform for the teleoperated robot and created a small dataset to validate the proposed method. The experiment shows that compared with the classic YOLOv5 series network model, the YOLOv5_Tel is higher in accuracy, lighter in weight, and faster in detection speed. The mean average precision (mAP) value of the YOLOv5_Tel increased by 0.8%, 0.9%, and 1.0%, respectively. The model size decreased by 11.1%, 70.0%, and 86.4%, respectively. The inference time decreased by 9.1%, 42.9%, and 58.3%, respectively. The proposed object localization method has a high localization accuracy with an average relative error of only 1.12%.

Keywords

• teleoperated robot
• object detection
• object localization
• improved YOLOv5 network
• distance estimation