Visual Tracking of a Hand–Eye Robot for a Moving Target Object with Multiple Feature Points: Translational Motion Compensation Approach

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a visual tracking control method of a hand–eye robot for a moving target object with multiple feature points. The hand–eye robot is composed of a 3-d.o.f. planar manipulator and a single charge-coupled-device camera that is mounted on the manipulator's end-effector. The control objective is to keep all feature points of the target object around their desired coordinates on the image plane. In many conventional visual servo methods, it is assumed that the target object is static. Consequently, the visual tracking error arises in the case of a moving target object. We have already proposed a visual tracking control system that takes into consideration the target object motion. This method can reduce the visual tracking error, but can only deal with a single feature point. Therefore, this paper extends such a visual tracking control method to multiple feature points. The effectiveness of our control method is evaluated experimentally.