A NEW APPROACH TO VISUAL SERVOING IN ROBOTICS

This paper describes a new approach to vision-based control in robotics. The basic idea consists of considering a vision system as a specific sensor dedicated to a task and included in a control servo loop. Once the necessary modeling stage is performed, the framework becomes one of automatic control, and naturally stability and robustness questions arise. The paper is organized as follows: in the introduction, state-of-the-art visual servoing is reviewed. Then the basic concepts for modeling the concerned interactions are given. The interaction screw is thus defined in a general way, and the application to images follows. Starting from the concept of task function, the general framework of the control is then described, and stability results are recalled. The concept of the hybrid task is also presented and then applied to visual sensors. The paper ends with the presentation of several simulation and experimental results, and some guidelines for future work are drawn in the conclusion.