Nonholonomic Mobile Robots Equipped with Panoramic Cameras: Corridor Following

The present work considers corridor{following maneuvers for mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints, 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 eld, a capability that the proposed control methods attempt to exploit. We consider two types of sensor{based controllers: one is a path{following state feedback control law where the state of the robot inside the corridor is reconstructed from the visual data; in the other, optical ow information from several distinct \looking" directions in the eld of view of the panoramic camera is used directly in the control loop, without the need for state reconstruction. The interest of the second type of controllers lies in the fact that this optical ow information is not su cient to reconstruct the state of the system, it is however su cient 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.