Visual servoing with cylinders: Reaching the desired location following a straight line

Moment-based features have been intensively explored in visual servoing (VS) applications, especially when lack of representational rigid points like in the bottle production line. Convergence and many other constraints exist in VS with image moments have seldom been simultaneously considered in the literature. This paper takes bottle-shape like cylinders as a target and proposes a set of new moment-based features of cylinders for global convergence in VS application. Building on convergence to the desired location, we plan a straight path from the current camera frame to the desired one and formulate camera rotation into quadratic polynomials of quaternion representation with some variables. A nonlinear minimization method is proposed to reassign these variables for meeting field of view (FOV) limits of these cylinders. In order to follow well this planned straight line, we propose an image-based tracking scheme. This paper belongs to a series of work aiming at robust VS based on image moments of some primitives. Simulation with two parallel cylinders and two crossed cylinders show the advantage of the proposed features and validate our proposed algorithm for both planning and tracking.