A new approach to vision-based robot control with omni-directional cameras

In the last decade, research on vision-based robot control has been concentrated on two main issues: the narrow field of view of the conventional camera and the model dependency of the standard visual servoing approaches. In this paper, we propose a simple and elegant solution to these issues. To enlarge the field of view of the cameras, we use omnidirectional cameras. And to overcome the model dependency problem, we propose a new visual servoing method for omnidirectional cameras that does not need any measure of the 3D structure of the observed target with respect to which the visual servoing is performed. Only visual information measured from the reference and the current images are needed in order to compute a task function isomorphic to the camera pose and to compute the control law to be applied to the robot. We provide the theoretical proof of the existence of the isomorphism and the theoretical proof of the local stability of the control law