A Switched Systems Approach to Image-Based Localization of Targets That Temporarily Leave the Camera Field of View

Image sensors have widespread use in many robotics applications and, in particular, in target tracking. While existing methods assume continuous image feedback, the novelty of this brief stems from the development of dwell time conditions to guarantee convergence of state estimates to an ultimate bound for a class of image-based observers in the presence of intermittent measurements. A Lyapunov analysis for the switched system is performed to develop convergence conditions based on the minimum amount of time the object must be visible and on the maximum amount of time the object may remain outside the camera view. Experimental results are included to verify the theoretical results and elucidate real-world performance.