A navigational framework combining Visual Servoing and spiral obstacle avoidance techniques

This paper presents a navigational framework which enables a robot to perform Long Range Navigation in the context of the Air-Cobot-Project in which a robot is used to execute an autonomous pre-flight inspection on an aircraft. The robot is equipped with Laser range finders and a mobile stereo camera system. The idea is to guide the robot to the pre-defined checkpoints using a Visual Servoing controller based on video data, while avoiding static and moving obstacles. The contribution of the paper is an avoidance technique derived from the spiral flight path of insects applied to the Laser range data. Simulation results validate the whole approach.