Collision Avoidance for Redundant Robots in Position-Based Visual Servoing

To tackle the problem on trajectory planning or the design of control law, this paper introduces a visual servoing system for a manipulator with redundant joints that the trajectory of the manipulator approaching the target is determined spontaneously by the visual control law. The proposed method resolves joint solution for visual servoing and obstacle avoidance. The work comprises of two procedures, feature extraction for position-based visual servoing (PBVS) and collision avoidance within the working envelope. In the PBVS control, the target pose must be reconstructed with respect to the robot and this results in a Cartesian motion-planning problem. Once the geometric relationship between the target and the end effector is determined, a secure inverse kinematics method incorporating trajectory planning is used to solve the solution of the redundant manipulator by the virtual repulsive torque method. Therefore, the links of the manipulator can always maintain a safe distance from obstacles while approaching the target smoothly. The proposed method is verified with its applicability in experiments using an eye-in-hand manipulator with seven joints. For reusability and extensibility, the system has been coded and constructed in the framework of the Robot Operating System so as that the developed algorithms can be disseminated to different platforms.