A switching approach to visual servo control

Abstract

In the recent past, many researchers have developed control algorithms for visual servo applications. In this paper we introduce a new switching approach, in which a high-level decision maker determines which of two low level visual servo controllers should be used at each control cycle. We introduce two new low-level controllers, one that relies on the homography between initial and goal images, and one that uses an affine transformation to approximate the motion between initial and goal camera configurations. Since an affine transformation can only approximate a restricted set of camera motions, this choice of low-level controllers illustrates the strength of the switching approach. We evaluated our approach with several simulations using three candidate switching rules. Although our results are preliminary, we believe that the proposed method is very promising for visual servo tasks in which there is a significant distance between the initial and goal configurations.