Fractional-Order Controller for Visual Servoing Systems

In this chapter, a control strategy based on fractional calculus for visual servoing systems is proposed. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to fractional-order control for an open-loop unstable dynamic system, i.e. a ball and plate dynamic set-up. Next, an image-based control strategy using a point features based fractional-order PI controller is designed for a manipulator robot. A real-time visual servoing plant, composed by a manipulator robot with 6 DOF with an eye-in-hand camera, is used for performance evaluation of the proposed control strategy. The image acquisition and processing, together with the computing of the image-based control law are implemented in MATLAB\(^{\textregistered }\). Using planar static objects, real-time experiments are used to evaluate the performance. The results reveal that the image-based fractional-order PI controller outperforms the conventional image-based integer-order PI controller.