Omnidirectional visual servoing from polar lines

Motivated by the growing interest for omnidirectional sensors on robotic applications and particularly on vision-based control, we present a new framework to handle in a visual servoing scheme the projection of line features into the image plane of a central catadioptric camera. As it is well known, the projection of a 3D line in the image plane of a central catadioptric camera is a conic curve. We propose to use the polar line of the image center with respect to this conic curve to define the input of the vision-based control scheme. The visual observations obtained from the polar lines lead to a minimal representation of projected lines. An efficient control scheme based only on two image features can then be designed. Simulation and experimental results confirm the validity of our approach