Vision-based control of mobile robots

This paper presents an approach for direct control of a mobile robot to keep it on a pre-taught path based solely on the perception from a monocular CCD camera. In particular, we present a novel vision-based control algorithm for mobile systems equipped with a conventional camera and a pan-tilt head or with an omnidirection camera. This algorithm avoids numerical instabilities of previously reported approaches. The experimental performance of the method as well as its practical limitations are discussed.