Object servoing of differential-drive service robots using switched control

Abstract

Object servoing is becoming more and more important for service robots. Because of the nonholonomic constraints of a differential-drive service robot and the possibly changed pose of a movable object, it is challenging to design an object servoing scheme for the differential-drive service robot such that it can asymptotically park at a predefined relative pose to that of the movable object. In this paper, a novel object servoing scheme is proposed for the differential-drive service robots using switched control. Each relative online pose is first estimated by using features of the movable object, the estimated pose is an input of an object servoing friendly parking controller. The linear velocity and angular speed are then determined by the proposed controller. Simulation results validate the performance of the proposed object servoing scheme. Due to its low online computational cost, the proposed scheme can be applied for the real-time tasks of differential-drive service robots to movable objects.

Keywords:

• Object servoing
• differential-drive service robots
• motion estimation
• parking controller
• asymptotic stabilisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Weibin Jia

Weibin Jia received the B.Eng. degree in Control Science and Engineering from Northeastern University in 2015, and the M.Eng. degree in Control Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2018. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree from Zhejiang University. His current research interests include intelligent control, trajectory planning, image processing and target detection.

Wenjie Zhao

Wenjie Zhao received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees all in Control Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2009 and 2014, respectively. He is currently an associate professor with the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Zhejiang University. His current research interests include cooperative control, path planning, and decision-making for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles.

Zhihuan Song

Zhihuan Song received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in industrial automation from Hefei University of Technology, Ahhui, China, in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in industrial automation from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1997. Since 1997, he has been in the Department of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, where he was first a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, then an Associate Professor, and is currently a Professor. He has published more than 200 papers in journals and conference proceedings. His research interests include the modelling and fault diagnosis of industrial processes, analytics and applications of industrial big data, and advanced process control technologies.

Zhengguo Li

Zhengguo Li (SM'03) received the B.Sci (Applied Mathematics). and M.Eng. (Automatic Control) from Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, in 1992 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree (Automatic Control) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2001. His current research interests include computational photography, mobile imaging, video processing & delivery, and switched and impulsive control. He has co-authored one monograph, more than 200 journal/conference papers including about 50 IEEE Transactions, and eleven granted USA patents, including normative technologies on scalable extension of H.264/AVC and HEVC. He has been actively involved in the development of H.264/AVC and HEVC since 2002. He had three informative proposals adopted by the H.264/AVC and three normative proposals adopted by the HEVC. Currently, he is with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore. Zhengguo served as a TPC Chair of IEEE IECON 2023 and 2020, a special session chair of IEEE ICASSP 2022, a Technical Brief Co-Founder of SIGGRAPH Asia, and leading Workshop Chair of IEEE ICME in 2013. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters from 2014 to 2016, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing from 2016 to 2020, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology from 2020 to 2024, and a Senior Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing from 2020 to 2024.