Vision-based Switching Control Strategy for a Nonholonomic Wheeled Mobile Robot with a Pan Camera

This paper presents a vision-based switching control strategy for a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot with a pan camera (NHWMR+PC). The control inputs of the NHWMR+PC consist of a pan rotational velocity of the camera and linear and angular velocities of the platform. When we adopt all three inputs for image-based visual servoing (IBVS), the standard IBVS controller does not work at all due to the singularity of the interaction matrix which depends on the configuration of the camera. For avoiding the singularity, we propose a switching control strategy which consists of two control modes: one is for IBVS using only two control inputs, and the other for regulating the platform orientation and the pan camera angle. The effectiveness of this strategy was validated through a simulation.