A visual servoing control law that is robust to image outliers

A fundamental step towards broadening the use of real world image-based visual servoing is to deal with the important issues of reliability and robustness. In order to address this issue, a closed loop control law is proposed that simultaneously accomplishes a visual servoing task and is robust to a general class of external errors. This generality allows concurrent consideration of a wide range of errors including: noise from image feature extraction, small scale errors in the tracking and even large scale errors in the matching between current and desired features. This is achieved with the application of widely accepted statistical techniques of robust M-estimation. The M-estimator is integrated by an iteratively re-weighted method. The median absolute deviation is used as an estimate of the standard deviation of the inlier data and is compared with other methods. This combination is advantageous because of its high efficiency, high breakdown point and desirable influence functions. The robustness and stability of the control law is shown to be dependent on a subsequent measure of position uncertainty. Furthermore the convergence criteria of the control law are investigated. Experimental results are presented which demonstrate visual servoing tasks which resist severe outlier contamination.