Tracking control for nonholonomic mobile robots with visual servoing feedback

This paper discusses a tracking control problem of nonholonomic mobile robots with visual servoing feedback. By comparing corresponding target points of an object from two different camera images, geometric relationships are exploited to derive a transformation that relates the actual position and orientation of the mobile robot to a reference position and orientation. This transformation is used to synthesize a rotation and translation error system from the current position and orientation to the fixed reference position and orientation. Lyapunov-based techniques are used to construct a robust controller to stabilize the error system with a constant, unmeasurable depth parameter. The contribution of this paper is that Lyapunov techniques are used to construct a robust controller that makes mobile robot position and orientation converge to the desired configuration despite the lack of an object model and the lack of depth information. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of the controller.