ViKi-HyCo: A Hybrid-Control approach for complex car-like maneuvers

While Visual Servoing is deeply studied to perform simple maneuvers, the complex cases where the target is far out of the camera field of view (FOV) during the maneuver are not common in the literature. For this reason, in this paper, we present ViKi-HyCo (Visual Servoing and Kinematic Hybrid-Controller). This approach generates the necessary maneuvers for the complex positioning of a non-holonomic mobile robot in outdoor environments. In this method, we use LiDAR-camera fusion for automatic target calculation. The multi-modal nature of our target representation allows us to hybridize the visual servoing with a kinematic controller. In this way, we can perform complex maneuvers even when the target is far away from the camera's FOV. The automatic target calculation is performed through object localization for outdoor environments, which estimates the spatial location of a target point for the kinematic controller and allows the dynamic calculation of a desired bounding box of the detected object for the visual servoing controller. The proposed approach does not require an object-tracking algorithm and can be applied to any visually tracking robotic task where its kinematic model is known. ViKi-HyCo has an error of 0.0428 ± 0.0467 m in the X-axis and 0.0515 ± 0.0323 m in the Y-axis at the end of a complete positioning task.