Pose Estimation for Grasping Preparation from Stereo Ellipses

This paper describes an approach for real-time preparation of grasping tasks, based on the low-order moments of the target’s shape on a stereo pair of images acquired by an active vision head. The objective is to estimate the 3D position and orientation of an object and of the robotic hand, by using computationally fast and independent software components. These measurements are then used for the two phases of a reaching task: (i) an initial phase whereby the robot positions its hand close to the target with an appropriate hand orientation, and (ii) a final phase where a precise hand-to-target positioning is performed using Position-Based Visual Servoing methods.