Reactive Mobile Robots Based on a Visual Servoing Approach

Abstract

This paper deals with vision based control applied to autonomous mobile robots. The general approach in robot vision separates vision from control (static look and move). An alternative way consists to specify the problem in terms of control directly into the sensor frame. This approach seems to be a fruitful way for implementing robotics tasks based on reactivity concept. We introduce a low level task specification by the notion of virtual linkage. This virtual linkage can be expressed by a set of constraints on the motion of a frame linked to the robot with respect to a certain frame associated to the environnment. It seems interesting to apply such a vision based control to a mobile robot. The robot considered here is a two wheels driven nonholonomic cart with a camera mounted on 3 d.o.f manipulator. In this study we consider the whole mechanical system constituted by the cart and its manipulator like a single kinematic chain. So in adding the degrees of freedoom of the arm to the ...