Robotic contour following based on visual servoing

Abstract

Presents a coherent approach for visual servoing tasks that consists of following the contours of unknown objects using a hand-eye robotic system. The motion of the contour relative to the camera sensor is estimated in real-time by processing the measured optical flow of a set of relevant feature points. The desired motion of the end-effector is then computed to minimize the displacements of the feature points with respect to a reference configuration in the image. Control schemes are used in order to stabilize the robot and enhance tracking performances. The authors illustrate the approach by experimental results acquired with a real-time environment, where their CMU-Direct-Drive Arm II follows the boundaries of motionless objects positioned in a plane parallel to the image plane. Three degrees of freedom of planar motions are thus servoed to perform the contour-following task.