Virtual-Goal-Guided RRT for Visual Servoing of Mobile Robots With FOV Constraint

In this article, a virtual-goal-guided rapidly exploring random tree (RRT)-based visual servoing approach is proposed for nonholonomic mobile robots to simultaneously satisfy the field-of-view (FOV) constraint and the velocity constraints during the motion toward the desired pose. The presented approach contains two parts: 1) trajectory planning in the scaled Euclidean space and 2) trajectory tracking control. For the trajectory planning part, a new virtual-goal-guided RRT algorithm is designed to guarantee the FOV constraint and the velocity constraints by iteratively exploring the scaled Euclidean space in the presence of unknown image depth. Specifically, a virtual goal directly behind the desired pose is set to guide the tree to extend laterally into the area wherein the robot is easier to satisfy the FOV constraint. In addition, the lateral extension of the tree also helps decrease the lateral error of the robot as much as possible. Following each successful extension toward the virtual goal node, a greedy extension from the newly explored node to the desired pose is attempted using a polar stabilization controller, so that the planned trajectory can accurately arrive at the desired pose. Each newly explored edge in the scaled space is projected into the image space to check for the FOV limit. For the visual tracking part, the final searched trajectory in the scaled space is first transformed into image feature trajectories, which are then tracked by an image-based visual tracking controller. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.