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Calibration-Free Image-Based Trajectory Tracking Control of Mobile Robots With an Overhead Camera

To make the controller implementation easier and to enhance the system robustness and control performance in the presence of the camera parameter uncertainties, it is very desired to develop vision-based control approaches without any offline or online camera calibration. In this article, we propose a new calibration-free image-based trajectory tracking control scheme for nonholonomic mobile robots with a truly uncalibrated fixed camera. By developing a novel camera-parameter-independent kinematic model, both offline and online camera calibration can be avoided in the proposed scheme, and any knowledge of the camera is not needed in the controller design. The proposed trajectory tracking control scheme can guarantee exponential convergence of the image position and velocity tracking errors. To illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme, experimental results are provided in this article. Note to Practitioners—This article was motivated by the vision-based motion control problem of mobile robots in uncalibrated environments. Existing vision-based motion control approaches for nonholonomic mobile robots generally depend on offline precise/coarse or online numerical/adaptive calibration of the camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and require precise or coarse knowledge of the camera in their implementation. This article presents a novel calibration-free image-based trajectory tracking control scheme, which can be implemented easily in real environments without any offline or online calibration of the camera parameters and can be used to efficiently control the motion of nonholonomic mobile robots with an arbitrarily placed and truly unknown overhead camera. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve satisfactory trajectory tracking control performance despite the lack of any knowledge about the camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters and the presence of unknown camera lens distortions, and hence, can provide a simple but efficient solution to the vision-based motion control problem of nonholonomic mobile robots.