Uncalibrated 3D visual servoing from projective reconstruction of control values

Visual servoing has been widely studied as a robust method for controlling a robot that can deal with unpredictable disturbances. However, existing visual servoing methods require that the robot and camera be calibrated in advance. Although the current authors have previously proposed an uncalibrated visual servoing method that does not require the camera and robot to be calibrated, the starting position of the robot had a large influence on the control process in that method. This paper presents an uncalibrated visual servoing method that can control a robot in the same way from any starting position by determining control values without uncertainty in the magnitude. In particular, it is demonstrated that a robot can be accurately guided to a target position by using projective reconstruction, which has been studied extensively in recent years in the field of computer vision, by introducing the concept of the projection of control values. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 89(10): 47–56, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.20314