Robotic visual servoing of moving targets

We present a new image-based visual servoing scheme for tracking moving targets. This is achieved with a twofold approach. First, we devise a straightforward adaptation of a previously proposed depth observer to account for the fact that the target is not stationary. Second, we estimate the disturbance on the visual feature dynamics due to the target motion, and we add a related compensation term to the visual controller. In particular, the target velocity components parallel to the image plane are reconstructed using a disturbance observer, whereas the orthogonal component is retrieved from the measurement of the Focus Of Expansion. Comparative experiments show that the proposed method can improve over classical visual servoing schemes by 50% or more.