Survey of vision-based robot control

In this paper, a short survey of vision-based robot control (generally called visual servoing) is presented. Visual servoing concerns several field of research including vision systems, robotics and automatic control. Visual servoing can be useful for a wide range of applications and it can be used to control many different dynamic systems (manipulator arms, mobile robots, aircraft, etc.). Visual servoing systems are generally classified depending on the number of cameras, on the position of the camera with respect to the robot, on the design of the error function to minimize in order to reposition the robot. In this paper, we describe the main visual servoing approaches proposed in the literature. For simplicity, the examples in the survey focuses on manipulator arms with a single camera mounted on the end-effector. Examples are taken from work made at the University of Cambridge for the European Long Term Research Project VIGOR (Visually guided robots using uncalibrated cameras).