Abstract-This paper presents a visual-servoing method that is based on 2-D ultrasound (US) images. The main goal is to guide a robot actuating a 2-D US probe in order to reach a desired cross-section image of an object of interest. The method we propose allows the control of both in-plane and out-of-plane probe motions. Its feedback visual features are combinations of moments extracted from the observed image. The exact analytical form of the interaction matrix that relates the image-moments time variation to the probe velocity is developed, and six independent visual features are proposed to control the six degrees of freedom of the robot. In order to endow the system with the capability of automatically interacting with objects of unknown shape, a model-free visual servoing is developed. For that, we propose an efficient online estimation method to identify the parameters involved in the interaction matrix. Results obtained in both simulations and experiments validate the methods presented in this paper and show their robustness to different errors and perturbations, especially those inherent to the noisy US images.

In this paper, we propose a nonlinear controller that stabilizes unmanned aerial vehicles in GPS-denied environments with respect to visual targets by using only onboard sensing. The translational velocity of the vehicle is estimated online with a nonlinear observer, which exploits spherical visual features as the main source of information. With the proposed solution, only four visual features have shown to be enough for the observer to operate in a real scenario. In addition, the observer is computationally light with constant numerical complexity, involving small-dimension matrices. The observer output is then exploited in a nonlinear controller designed with an integral backstepping approach, thus yielding a novel robust control system. By means of Lyapunov analysis, the stability of the closed-loop system is proved. Extensive simulation and experimental tests with a quadrotor are carried out to verify the validity and robustness of the proposed approach. The control system runs fully onboard on a standard processor, and only a low-cost sensing suite is employed. Tracking of a target whose speed exceeds 2 m/s is also considered in the real-hardware experiments.Index Terms-Image-based visual servoing, nonlinear controller, nonlinear observer, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), velocity estimation.

This paper presents a new image-based servo control scheme that endows an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a robotic arm with the capability of automatically positioning elements on target objects. Through a new formalism, the proposed visual servo scheme controls both the UAV and the manipulator simultaneously. It takes into account the whole system redundancy as well as the peculiarity of under-actuation related to rotary-wing crafts. While it controls the system at the velocity level, it makes use of the mobility afforded by the UAV and the dexterity inherent to robot manipulators. The case of large initial errors is explicitly addressed. Results of simulations are reported to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.