Image-Based Visual Servo Control Of Robots

Visual servo control offers advantages for flexibility and interactive performance of robotic systems. Design of such systems requires formal analysis of both the image processing requirements and the control strategy for multi-degree-of-freedom systems. Image features may be extracted and interpreted to provide estimates of relative camera position in three-dimensional space. Image features in themselves often maintain continuity during sequences of time-varying images, and that continuity provides a basis for use of features as control variables. Analysis and simulation of model reference adaptive control structures have shown that with proper attention to regimes of operation and priority among features, image-based control of multi-degree-of-freedom systems may provide improved dynamic performance due to reduction in image interpretation computational load and estimation noise.