Omni-directional visual servoing for human-robot interaction

In this paper, we describe a visual servoing system developed as a human-robot interface to drive a mobile robot toward any chosen target. An omni-directional camera is used to get the 360 degree of field of view, and an efficient SSD based tracking technique is developed to track the target. The use of the omnidirectional geometry eliminates many of the problems common in visual tracking and makes the use of visual servoing a practical alternative for robot-human interaction. The experiments demonstrate that it is an effective and robust way to guide a robot. In particular, the experiments show robustness of the tracker to loss of template, vehicle motion, and change in scale and orientation.