Visual servoing to an arbitrary pose with respect to an object given a single known length

Nicholas R. Gans, Ashwin P. Dani, Warren E. Dixon

Abstract: A method is presented to attach reference frames to piecewise planar objects in view a single camera. This method uses Euclidean homography relationships and a single known geometric length on a single object. By attaching reference frames to objects in the scene, the method is useful in position-based visual servo control, where it allows control of pose with respect to an object. The method is distinguished from methods that require a detailed model of the object/scene to give camera pose relative to an object, and it is distinguished from methods that can only give current camera pose with respect to a pose where a reference image was taken. Simulations of the method for camera-in-hand and camera-to-hand visual servo control tasks are presented. Experiments are presented where the reconstruction method is used to estimate the pose of a vehicle. These experiments represent the initial steps in a vision- based vehicle following controller.