An active visual servoing strategy for nonholonomic mobile robots

This paper presents a novel two-level scheme for active visual servoing of a mobile robot equipped with a pan camera. In the lower level, the pan platform carrying an on-board camera is controlled to keep the target points lying around the center of the image plane. On the higher level, a switched controller is utilized to drive the mobile robot to reach the desired configuration through image feature feedback. The designed active visual servo systems present such advantages as follows: i. a satisfactory solution for the field of view (FOV) problem; ii. global high servo efficiency; iii. free of any complex pose estimation algorithm usually required for visual servo systems. Simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed active visual servo method.