On-Board Vision Using Visual-Servoing for RoboCup F-180 League Mobile Robots

In the RoboCup F-180 league competition, vision is predominantly provided by an overhead camera which relays a global view of the field. There are inherent disadvantages in utilising this system, particularly the delays associated with the capture, transmission and processing of vision data. To minimise these delays and to equip the robots with greater autonomy, visual servoing on-board the individual robots is proposed. This paper presents evaluation of two visual servoing methods for mobile robots: position-based and image-based servoing. Traditional implementations of image-based servoing have relied on partial pose estimation, negating much of the advantage gained from using this method. This paper will present an alternative implementation of image-based servoing for approaching objects on the ground plane, which disposes of the pose estimation step and fully relies only on image features. To evaluate the suitability of both visual servoing methods to F-180, the task of docking with the ball is used as a basis of the investigation.