Non-central catadioptric cameras visual servoing for mobile robots using a radial camera model

Catadioptric cameras combine conventional cameras and mirrors to create omnidirectional sensors providing 360° panoramic views of a scene. Modeling such cameras has been subject of significant research interest in the computer vision community leading to a deeper understanding of the image properties and also to different models for different types of configurations. Visual servoing applications using catadioptric cameras have essentially been using central cameras and the corresponding unified projection model. So far only in very few cases more general models have been used. In this paper we address the problem of visual servoing using the so-called the radial model. The radial model can be applied to many camera configurations and in particular to non-central catadioptric systems with mirror shapes that are symmetric around the optical axis. In this case we show that the radial model can be used with a non-central catadioptric camera to allow effective image-based visual servoing (IBVS) of a mobile robot. Using this model, which is valid for a large set of catadioptric cameras, new visual features are proposed to control the degrees of freedom of a mobile robot moving on a plane. Several simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of such features.