Visual Navigation

Visual servo-control using fire-wire camera mounted on a mobile robot

LED panel allows visual-servoing in smoke conditions

When the robot is located near a point of interest such as a door, an LED panel can be used for fine-grained localization. Computing the pose, we can obtain the position of the robot and performing visual-servoing it is possible to move it to the required place by using the programmable high luminosity LED panel. A firewire camera (FOculus FO124) has been mounted on the robot, which is operated on-board by an application running on the mini-PC, by taking image of the LED panel. This panel acts as a landmark in order to estimate the current position of the robot by using a computer vision pose-estimation method. As the geometry of the LED panel is known in advance, it is possible to use a geometric method to estimate the pose, having previously calibrated the camera. The location error with the visual pose estimation is of a few centimeters.