Corridor following by Mobile Robots Equipped with Panoramic Cameras

The present work considers corridor–following maneuvers for nonholonomic mobile robots, guided by sensory data acquired by panoramic cameras. The panoramic vision system provides information from an environment with textured walls to the motion control system, which drives the robot along a corridor. Panoramic cameras have a 360 visual field, a capability that the proposed control methods exploit. In our sensor–based control scheme, optical flow information from several distinct viewing directions in the entire field of view of the panoramic camera is used directly in the control loop, without the need for state reconstruction. The interest of this lies in the fact that the optical flow information is not sufficient to reconstruct the state of the system, it is however sufficient for the proposed control law to accomplish the desired task. Driving the robot along a corridor amounts to the asymptotic stabilization of a subsystem of the robot’s kinematics and the proposed control schemes are shown to achieve this goal.