A Simple Visual Servoing and Navigation Algorithm for an Omnidirectional Robot

This paper presents a simple visual servoing and navigation algorithm for guiding a holonomic or omnidirectional robot. The algorithm facilitates a mobile robot equipped mainly with a webcam to autonomously navigate an unknown environment and explore the path from start configuration to goal configuration along some checkpoints while avoiding obstacles. We have adopted an off-the-shelf toy robot, WowWeeTM´s Rovio, as robotic platform for our experiments. The proposed algorithm infers information directly from the images that are related to the environment as the Robot faces while navigating and guides the robot to perform image- based navigation. Experimental results on an omnidirectional robot demonstrate that the robot can successfully navigates through building environment and finds the goal point within a reasonable amount of time.