Uncalibrated Visual Servoing

Abstract

Visual servoing is a process to enable a robot to position a camera with respect to known landmarks using the visual data obtained by the camera itself to guide camera motion. A solution is described which requires very little a priori information freeing it from being specific to a particular configuration of robot and camera. The solution is based on closed loop control together with deliberate perturbations of the trajectory to provide calibration movements for refining that trajectory. Results from experiments in simulation and on a physical robot arm (camera-in-hand configuration) are presented. 1 Introduction Visual servoing is a process by which the appearance of landmarks is used to control the positioning of the camera with respect to the world. The camera is thus the sensor for a control scheme, in which the position of the camera itself is the object of control. The objective is for a robot to position the camera in a specific `target' pose (defined at initialisati...