Dynamic visual tracking control of a mobile robot with image noise and occlusion robustness

This paper presents a robust visual tracking control design for a nonholonomic mobile robot equipped with a tilt camera. This design aims to allow the mobile robot to keep track of a dynamic moving target in the camera’s field-of-view; even though the target is temporarily fully occluded. To achieve this, a control system consisting of a visual tracking controller (VTC) and a visual state estimator (VSE) is proposed. A novel visual interaction model is derived to facilitate the design of VTC and VSE. The VSE is responsible for estimating the optimal target state and target image velocity in the image space. The VTC then calculates the corresponding command velocities for the mobile robot to work in the world coordinates. The proposed VSE not only possesses robustness against the image noise, but also overcomes the temporary occlusion problem. Computer simulations and practical experiments of a mobile robot to track a moving target have been carried out to validate the performance and robustness of the proposed system.