Autonomous running technique by visual servoing considering route transition and running behavior

Visual servoing is one type of vision-based robot movement control. Measurement of robot's own position is not required because the movement of the robot is controlled to match the image obtained by the vision sensors on the robot to a given image (teaching image) obtained beforehand. In this paper we propose an autonomous running technique of visual servoing in consideration of route transition and rough running behavior to reach the position of obtaining a teaching image. The route transition technique is needed to avoid obstacles on the running route and contributes to reducing the data size of the route information abstracted from teaching images because the data of overlapping parts of teaching routes can be omitted. The sampling interval of teaching images can be made longer by considering the running behavior. This contributes to teaching data reduction. An experimental autonomous running vehicle is developed and the proposed technique is demonstrated.