Visual servoing techniques applied to underwater vehicles

In a visual servoing approach, the control objective is stated in terms of regulating an output function directly expressed in the image space. This approach is particularly usefull when the robotic task can be naturally specified as a relative positioning of a sensor frame handled by the robot with regard to a peculiar part of the environment. In our previous works (Espiau et al. (1992), Rives et al. (1996)), we developed a framework which allows us to handle the different steps of a visual servoing application from the specification level to the synthesis of a robust controller. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of such a framework applied to a specific pipe inspection task using the Ifremer´s ROV Vortex. We show simulation results which validate the approach in presence of modeling errors and measurement noises. We also present experimental issues both in terms of implementation and performances