On the observability of robot motion under active camera control

Defines a measure of "observability" of robot motion that can be used in evaluating a hand/eye set-up with respect to the ease of achieving vision-based control. This extends the analysis of "manipulability" of a robotic mechanism in Yoshikawa (1983) to incorporate the effect of visual features. The authors discuss how the observability measure can be applied for active camera placement and for robot trajectory planning to improve the visual servo control. The authors use the examples of a planar 2-DOF arm and a PUMA-type 3-DOF arm to show the variation of the observability and manipulability measure with respect to the relative position of the active camera.<<ETX>>