Adaptive Active Visual Servoing of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

This paper presents a novel two-level scheme for adaptive active visual servoing of a mobile robot equipped with a pan camera. In the lower level, the pan platform carrying an onboard camera is controlled to keep the reference points lying around the center of the image plane. On the higher level, a switched controller is utilized to drive the mobile robot to reach the desired configuration through image feature feedback. The designed active visual servoing system presents such advantages as follows: 1) a satisfactory solution for the field-of-view problem; 2) global high servoing efficiency; and 3) free of any complex pose estimation algorithm usually required for visual servoing systems. The performance of the active visual servoing system is proven by rigorous mathematical analysis. Both simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed active visual servoing method.