A bearing-only 2D/3D-homing method under a visual servoing framework

Homing is one of the fundamental functions for both the mobile robot and the flying robot. Furthermore, homing can be introduced into a topological navigation system by cyclically setting Home positions at the keypoints/nodes in a topological map. In this work, we describe a bearing-only homing method based on only few matching keypoints to grant the mobile robot the homing ability. Our method considers the homing problem as a visual servoing problem in 2D plane and even in 3D space, using an omnidirectional camera as the visual sensor. It doesn't require the distance information to the reference feature points. The proof of the convergence for the algorithm is also given. The simulation results confirm the feasibility and robustness of our method.