Guiding robot motion using zooming and focusing

Abstract

This work explores hand-eye coordination of robots by using a camera with functions of zooming and focusing. Under the guidance of the camera, a robot hand can arrive at an object to manipulate it in the 3D space. The hand movement is decomposed into the move parallel to the image plane and the move in depth, which are controlled from image position and focus value of the hand. The focal value is put on the destination object and the hand move in depth tries to increase the image sharpness of the hand. The zooming, focusing, and 2D image position control cooperate with each other and work in feedback fashion. The fovea control of eye realized by zooming from wide-angle to tele-angle brings both flexibility and accuracy in locating hand position.