language: en

A Tutorial on Visual Servo Control

Seth Hutchinson
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
405 N. Mathews Avenue Urbana, IL 61801
Email: seth@uiuc.edu
Greg Hager
Department of Computer Science Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520-8285

[Phone: 203 432-6432]

Email: hager@cs.yale.edu
Peter Corke
CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology
P.O. Box 883, Kenmore. Australia, 4069.
pic@brb.dmt.csiro.au May 14, 1996

Abstract This paper provides a tutorial introduction to visual servo control of robotic manipulators. Since the topic spans many disciplines our goal is limited to providing a basic conceptual framework. We begin by reviewing the prerequisite topics from robotics and computer vision, including a brief review of coordinate transformations, velocity representation, and a description of the geometric aspects of the image formation process. We then present a taxonomy of visual servo control systems. The two major classes of systems, position-based and image-based systems, are then discussed. Since any visual servo system must be capable of tracking image features in a sequence of images, we include an overview of feature-based and correlation-based methods for tracking. We conclude the tutorial with a number of observations on the current directions of the research field of visual servo control.