Leader-Follower Formations: Uncalibrated Vision-Based Localization and Control

Abstract

This paper focuses on leader-follower formations of mobile robots equipped with panoramic cameras and extend earlier works in the literature addressing both the vision-based localization and control problems. First, a new sufficient analytical condition for localizability is proved and used to shed light on the geometrical meaning of formation localization using uncalibrated vision sensors, here performed with the unscented Kalman filter. Second, we design a feedback control law based on dynamic extension in order to extend the applicability of our control scheme also to the case of distant robots.