Visual Servoing for Mobile Ground Navigation

This paper presents a vision-based control framework that attempts to mitigate several shortcomings of current approaches to mobile navigation, including the requirement for detailed 3D maps. The framework defines potential fields in image space and uses a subsumption process to combine hard, physical constraints with soft, guidance constraints while guaranteeing that hard constraint information is preserved. In addition, this representation can be defined with constant size, which can enable strong run-time guarantees to be made for visual servoing-based control. The framework is demonstrated with proof-of-concept examples in simulation and the real world, as well as data sets and an open source implementation.