Low-Complexity Leader-Following Formation Control of Mobile Robots Using Only FOV-Constrained Visual Feedback

This article aims to solve the problem of formation control of mobile robots based on image and provide a low-cost as well as ease-of-implementation solution for mobile robots relying merely on a monocular camera under field-of-view (FOV) constraints. A low-complexity image-based visual servo controller is proposed, which can achieve the desired relative position on the image plane and solve the FOV constraints without the feature depth and leader’s velocities information. To facilitate the control design, a state transformation is first performed to decouple the visual motion kinematics. Then, an error transformation is introduced to handle the FOV constraints, and performance specifications are incorporated in the error transformation to achieve the predefined control performance. Finally, a simple static controller is derived using only information from images, and the stability of the uncertain system with unknown control direction/coefficients under the given performance control condition is analyzed. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed visual servoing controller can be illustrated using both simulations and experiments.