Tutorial TT3: A Tutorial on Visual Servo Control

Preface Two y ears ago at the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, we organized a workshop on visual servo c o n trol. The workshop was an overwhelming success, with over 60 participants interested in hearing about the current state of vision-based control. A short poll of participants indicated that most were viewing the workshop as a \tuto-rial" of sorts. Unfortunately, the workshop format did not best serve their interests in this regard. For this reason, we h a ve organized this tutorial with the goal of presenting some of the basic ideas behind vision-based control in a carefully prepared manner. This tutorial is also well-timed from the standpoint of visual servo development. Until recently, the hardware costs for a real-time visual servo s y s t e m w ere extremely high (including real-time vision system, real-time robot control interfaces, etc.). Building a visual servoing system required expertise in areas of control, real time systems, and visual tracking. However technology has advanced to the point that the visual processing and control calculations required for visual servoing can be performed on workstations or PC's. This, combined with increased scientiic understanding of visual servo-control has made it possible to construct modular visual servoing systems in software that operate at or near camera frame rate. Hence, we believe the time is ripe to capitalize on the potential of visual servoing for commercial and scientiic applications.