Bearing-Only Navigation with Field of View Constraints

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of navigation using only relative direction measurements (i.e., relative distances are unknown) under field of view constraints. We present a novel navigation vector field for the bearing-based visual homing problem with respect to static visual landmarks in 2-D and 3-D environments. Our method employs two control fields that are tangent and normal to ellipsoids having landmarks as their foci. The tangent field steers the robot to a set of points where the average of observed bearings is parallel to the average of the desired bearings, and the normal field uses the angle between a pair of bearings as a proxy to adjust the robot's distance from landmarks and to satisfy the field of view constraints. Both fields are blended together to construct an almost globally stable control law. Our method is easy to implement, as it requires only comparisons between average bearings, and between angles of pairs of vectors. We provide simulations that demonstrate the performance of our approach for a double integrator system and unicycles.