Survey on Visual Servoing for Manipulation

Vision guided robotics has been one of the major research issue for more than three decades. The more recent technological development facilitated the advancement in the area which has resulted in a number of successful and even commercial systems using off–the–shelf hardware. The applications of visually guided systems are many: from intelligent homes to automotive industry. However, one of the open and commonly stated problems in the area is the need for exchange of experiences and research ideas. In our opinion, a good starting point for this is to advertise the successes and propose a common terminology in form of a survey paper. The paper concentrates on different types of visual servoing: image based, position based and 2 1/2D visual servoing. Different issues concerning both the hardware and software requirements are considered and the most prominent contributions are reviewed. The proposed terminology is used to introduce a young researcher and lead the experts in the field through a three decades long historical field of vision guided robotics. We also include a number of real–world examples from our own research providing not only a conceptual framework but also illustrating most of the issues covered in the paper.