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 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 camera-LiDAR 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 field of view. The automatic target calculation is performed through object localization for outdoor environments that estimate the spatial location of a target point for the kinematic controller and allow the dynamic calculation of a desired bounding box of the detected object for the visual servoing controller. The presented approach does not require an object-tracking algorithm and applies to any visually tracking robotic task where its kinematic model is known. The ViKi-HyCo gives an error of 0.0428 \pm 0.0467 m in the X-axis and 0.0515 \pm 0.0323 m in the Y-axis at the end of a complete positioning task.