Visual servoing of a wheeled mobile robot for intercepting a moving object

We present a vision-based scheme for driving a nonholonomic mobile robot to intercept a moving target. Our method relies on a two-level approach. On the lower level, the pan-tilt platform which carries the on-board camera is controlled so as to keep the target at the center of the image plane. On the higher level, the robot operates under the assumption that the camera system achieves perfect tracking. In particular, the relative position of the ball is retrieved from the pan/tilt angles through simple geometry, and used to compute a control law driving the robot to the target. Various possible choices are discussed for the high-level robot controller. The proposed visual interception method is validated through simulations as well as experiments on the mobile robot MagellanPro.