Using orthogonal visual servoing errors for classifying terrain

Abstract

A novel, centimeter-scale crawling robot has been developed to address applications in surveillance, search-and-rescue, and planetary exploration. This places constraints on size and durability that minimizes the mechanism. As a result, a dual-use design employing two arms for both manipulation and locomotion was conceived. In a complementary fashion, this paper investigates the dual-use of visual servoing error. Visual servoing can be used by a mobile robot for homing and tracking. But because ground-based mobile robots are inherently planar, the control methodology (steering) is one-dimensional. The two-dimensional nature of image-based servoing leaves additional information content to be used in other contexts. We explore this information in the context of classifying terrain conditions. An outline for gait adaptation based on this is suggested for future work.