VISUAL SERVO TRACKING CONTROL VIA A LYAPUNOV-BASED APPROACH By GUOQIANG HU A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy VISUAL SERVO TRACKING CONTROL VIA A LYAPUNOV-BASED APPROACH By Guoqiang Hu December 2007 Chair: Dr. Warren E. Dixon Major: Mechanical Engineering Recent advances in image processing, computational technology and control theory are enabling visual servo control to become more prevalent in robotics and autonomous systems applications. In this dissertation, visual servo control algorithms and architectures are developed that exploit the visual feedback from a camera system to achieve a tracking or regulation control objective for a rigid-body object (e.g., the end-effector of a robot manipulator, a satellite, an autonomous vehicle) identified by a patch of feature points. The first two chapters present the introduction and background information for this dissertation. In the third chapter, a new visual servo tracking control method for a rigid-body object is developed by exploiting a combination of homography techniques, a quaternion parameterization, adaptive control techniques, and nonlinear Lyapunov-based control methods. The desired trajectory to be tracked is represented by a sequence of images (e.g., a video), which can be taken online or offline by a camera. This controller is singularity-free by using the homography techniques and the quaternion parameterization. In the fourth chapter, a new collaborative visual servo control method is developed to enable a rigid-body