Adaptive Visual Servo Control of Robots

Visual servo robot control systems provide feedback on the relative end-effector position of a robot. They offer an interactive positioning mechanism which depends upon extraction and interpretation of visual information from the environment. In this paper, we characterise visual servo systems by the feedback representation mode, position-based or image-based, and the joint control mode, closed-loop or open-loop. The design problems posed by nonlinear and coupling transformations introduced by visual tracking systems are discussed, and a design strategy which utilises adaptive control, direction detection, and a logical control hierarchy is proposed.