A Direct Interpretation of Dynamic Images with Camera and Object Motions for Vision Guided Robot Control

A general scheme to represent the relation between dynamic images and camera and/or object motions is proposed for applications to visual control of robots. We consider the case where a moving camera observes moving objects in a static scene. The camera obtains images of the objects moving within the scene. Then, the possible combinations of the camera and the objects' poses and the obtained images are not arbitrary but constrained to each other. Here we represent this constraint as a lower dimensional hypersurface in the product space of the whole combination of their motion control parameters and image data. The visual control is interpreted as to find a path on this surface leading to their poses where a given goal image will be obtained. In this paper, we propose a visual control method to utilize tangential properties of this surface. First, we represent images with a composition of a small number of “eigen images” by using K-L (Karhunen-Loève) expansion. Then, we consider to reconstruct the eigen space (the eigen image space) to achieve efficient and straightforward controls. Such reconstruction of the space results in the constraint surface being mostly flat within the eigen space. By this method, visual control of robots in a complex configuration is achieved without image processing to extract and correspond image features in dynamic images. The method also does not need camera or hand-eye calibrations. Experimental results of visual servoing with the proposed method show the feasibility and applicability of our newly proposed approach to a simultaneous control of camera self-motion and object motions.