This article proposes an autonomous docking control for nonholonomic constrained mobile robots and applies it to an intelligent mobility device or wheelchair for assisting the user in approaching resting furniture such as a chair or a bed. We defined a virtual landmark inferred from the target docking destination. Then, we solve the problem of keeping the targeted volume inside the field of view (FOV) of a tracking camera and docking to the virtual landmark through a novel definition that enables to control for the desired end pose. In this article, we proposed a nonlinear feedback controller to perform the docking with the depth camera's FOV as a constraint.Then, a numerical method is proposed to find the feasible space of initial states where convergence could be guaranteed. Finally, the entire system was embedded for real-time operation on a standing wheelchair with the virtual landmark estimation by three-dimensional object tracking with an RGB-D camera and we validated the effectiveness in simulation and experimental evaluations. The results show the guaranteed convergence for the feasible space depending on the virtual landmark location. In the implementation, the robot converges to the virtual landmark while respecting the FOV constraints.

中文翻译：

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基于虚拟地标的辅助移动设备对接支持控制

本文提出了一种非完整约束移动机器人的自主对接控制，并将其应用于智能移动设备或轮椅，以帮助用户接近椅子或床等休息家具。我们定义了从目标对接目的地推断出的虚拟地标。然后，我们解决了将目标体积保持在跟踪相机的视野 (FOV) 内并通过一种新颖的定义与虚拟地标对接的问题，该定义能够控制所需的最终姿势。在本文中，我们提出了一种非线性反馈控制器，以深度相机的FOV为约束进行对接。然后，提出了一种数值方法来寻找可以保证收敛的初始状态的可行空间。最后，整个系统嵌入在站立的轮椅上进行实时操作，通过 RGB-D 相机的三维物体跟踪进行虚拟地标估计，我们验证了模拟和实验评估的有效性。结果显示可行空间的保证收敛取决于虚拟地标位置。在实现中，机器人在遵守 FOV 约束的同时收敛到虚拟地标。