Robust Mobile Robot Visual Tracking Control System Using Self-Tuning Kalman Filter

This paper presents a novel design of a robust visual tracking control system, which consists of a visual tracking controller and a visual state estimator. This system facilitates human-robot interaction of a unicycle-modeled mobile robot equipped with a tilt camera. Based on a novel dual-Jacobian visual interaction model, a dynamic motion target can be tracked using a single visual tracking controller without target´s 3D velocity information. The visual state estimator aims to estimate the optimal system state and target image velocity, which is used later by the visual tracking controller. To achieve this, a self-tuning Kalman filter is proposed to estimate interesting parameters online in real-time. Further, because the proposed method is fully working in image space, the computational complexity and the sensor/camera modeling errors can be reduced. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, in terms of tracking performance, system convergence, and robustness.