Visual Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots

Vision-based control of wheeled mobile robots is an interesting field of research from a scientific and even social point of view due to its potential applicability. This book presents a formal treatment of some aspects of control theory applied to the problem of vision-based pose regulation of wheeled mobile robots. In this problem, the robot has to reach a desired position and orientation, which are specified by a target image. It is faced in such a way that vision and control are unified to achieve stability of the closed loop, a large region of convergence, without local minima and good robustness against parametric uncertainty. Three different control schemes that rely on monocular vision as unique sensor are presented and evaluated experimentally. A common benefit of these approaches is that they are valid for imaging systems obeying approximately a central projection model, e.g., conventional cameras, catadioptric systems and some fisheye cameras. Thus, the presented control schemes are generic approaches. A minimum set of visual measurements, integrated in adequate task functions, are taken from a geometric constraint imposed between corresponding image features. Particularly, the epipolar geometry and the trifocal tensor are exploited since they can be used for generic scenes. A detailed experimental evaluation is presented for each control scheme.

Unifies formal aspects of control theory with concepts of computer vision to achieve good performance in the problem of visual serving of mobile robots Presents generic and robust visual control schemes Exploits the properties of geometric constraints for direct visual feedback All the presented control schemes are evaluated through simulations and real-world experiments using different platforms and vision systems

Inhalt

Introduction.- Robust visual control based on the epipolar geometry.- A robust control scheme based on the trifocal tensor.- Dynamic pose-estimation for visual control.- Conclusions.