Vision-based force following control for mobile robots

This paper presents a vision based force following control for mobile robots. In the proposed motion controller, external force of mobile robot and robot velocity are estimated only from visual information. The estimated velocity is used as feedback signal of velocity controller, and estimated external force is used for force following motion. Therefore, any internal sensor, such as force/torque sensor, encoder and tachometer, are not required in our approach. By designing vision based motion controller, autonomous robust motion against disturbances and force following motion are realized in unified framework of visual feedback. The validities of the proposed motion controller are verified by several experimental results.