THE FRAMEWORK OF CONTROLLED ACTIVE VISION

One of the most desirable characteristics of a robotic manipulator is its flexibility. Flexibility and adaptability can be achieved by incor porating vision and generally, sensory information in the feedback loo p. Our research introduces a framework called controlled active vision for efficient integration of the vision sensor in the feedback loop. This framework was applied to the problem of robotic visual tracking a nd servoing, and the results were very promising. Full 3-D robotic vis ual tracking was achieved at rates of 30 Hz. Most importantly, the tra cking was successful even under the assumption of poor calibration of the eye-in-hand system. This paper extends this framework to other pro blems of sensor-based robotics, such as the derivation of depth maps f rom controlled motion; the vision-assisted grasping; the active calibr ation of the system robot-camera; and the computation of the relative pose of the target with respect to the camera. We address these proble ms by combining adaptive control techniques with computer vision algor ithms. The paper concludes with a discussion on several relative issue s such as the stability and robustness of the proposed algorithms and the problem of incorporating stereo information in the existing algori thms in order to increase the accuracy of the estimated depth.