Nonlinear visual control of remote cellular robots

JOSÉ SANTOS VÍCTOR; RICARDO CARELLI; S. VAN DER SWAAN

Lisboa, Portugal

Conferencia; Mediterranean Control Conference, MED 2002; 2002

This paper presents the design of a stable nonlinear control system for the remote visual position control of a cellular robot. Under realistic assumptions, we prove that the control system succeeds to drive the robot to a neighborhood of the target point, in spite of the unknown camera position and orientation. Two cases are analyzed: the first one considers that only the heading of the robot is controlled and, in the second case, the heading and linear velocity are both simultaneously controlled. The control algorithm is based only on the measurements on the image plane of the vision camera -direct vision control-, thus avoiding the problems related to  amera calibration. The proposed controllers can be easily generalized to the problem of controlling many robots performing a cooperative task.