Visual servoing of an omni-directional mobile robot for alignment with parking lot lines

ODIS is an omni-directional mobile robot designed to autonomously or semi-autonomously inspect automobiles in a parking lot. Periodically, its position and orientation references need to be reset. This paper considers visual servoing to parking lot lines as one possible approach. Analysis and simulations demonstrate that a surprisingly simple proportional controller in the image coordinates can accomplish position and orientation alignment with parking lot lines. Unlike previous work, no image Jacobian matrix is necessary. Knowledge of the camera focal length is not required, but the camera and vehicle axes are assumed to be aligned, and the vehicle is assumed to rotate about the camera frame's y-axis.