Epipole-Based Visual Servoing with Central Catadioptric Camera

This paper presents an epipolar based visual servoing for mobile robots equipped with a panoramic camera. The proposed visual servoing is based on the epipolar geometry and exploits the auto-epipolar property, a special configuration for the epipoles which occurs when the desired and the current views undergo a pure translation. This occurrence is detectable observing when the bi-osculating mirror conics co-intersect at the two epipoles. The auto epipolar condition enables our controller to retrieve the equal orientation between target and current camera. Translation is performed by exploiting the epipoles. Simulated experiments and Lyapunov-based stability analysis demonstrate the parametric robustness of the proposed method.