Visual station keeping for floating robots in unstructured environments

This paper describes the use of vision for navigation of mobile robots floating in 3D space. The problem addressed is that of automatic station keeping relative to some naturally textured environmental region. Due to the motion disturbances in the environment (currents), these tasks are important to keep the vehicle stabilized relative to an external reference frame. Assuming short range regions in the environment, vision can be used for local navigation, so that no global positioning methods are required. A planar environmental region is selected as a visual landmark and tracked throughout a monocular video sequence. For a camera moving in 3D space, the observed deformations of the tracked image region are according to planar projective transformations and reveal information about the robot relative position and orientation w.r.t. the landmark. This information is then used in a visual feedback loop so as to realize station keeping. Both the tracking system and the control design are discussed. Two robotic platforms are used for experimental validation, namely an indoor aerial blimp and a remote operated underwater vehicle. Results obtained from these experiments are described.