A Leader-follower formation control of mobile robots by position-based visual servo method using fisheye camera

This paper presents a leader-follower formation control of multiple mobile robots by position-based method using a fisheye camera. A fisheye camera has a wide field of view and recognizes a wide range of objects. In this paper, the fisheye camera is first modeled on spherical coordinates and then a position estimation technique is proposed by using an AR marker based on the spherical model. This paper furthermore presents a method for estimating the velocity of a leader robot based on a disturbance observer using the obtained position information. The proposed techniques are combined with a formation control based on the virtual structure. In this paper, the formation controller and velocity estimator can be designed independently, and the stability analysis of the total system is performed by using Lyapunov theorem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulation and experiments using two real mobile robots.

Automated summary

This paper presents a leader-follower formation control of multiple mobile robots using a fisheye camera. The camera is first modeled on spherical coordinates and a position estimation technique is proposed based on an AR marker. The velocity of the leader robot is estimated using a disturbance observer. The proposed techniques are combined with a formation control based on a virtual structure, and the stability of the total system is analyzed using Lyapunov theorem.