Selection and modification of active camera configurations using visibility and manipulability measures

In this paper, we present automatic selection and modification of camera configurations according to the motion of surrounding object by considering the camera’s visibility and the manipulator’s manipulability simultaneously. The visibility constraint guarantees that the whole of a target object could be ‘viewed’ with no occlusions by the surroundings, while the manipulability constraint guarantees that the avoidance of the singular position of the manipulator and the rapid modification of the camera position are possible. For a fast computation of the visibility region, spherical projection method is proposed where the projected boundary of the visibility region is calculated in θ−φ spaces instead of x-y-z spaces. The results of the simulations and experiments show that the active camera system with an eye-in-hand configuration is able to modify its configuration according to the motion of surrounding object.