Feature-Based Visual Servoing and its Application to Telerobotics

Abstract

Automation and robotics are rapidly becoming extremely attractive areas within space technology. They hold the promise of assembly, servicing, and repair with a minimal number of expensive manned missions. However, unlike a factory environment, space operations require the ability to work in an environment that is unstructured. For this reason, some amount of autonomous behavior is necessary to perform complex, diverse tasks. Recent advances in visual servoing theory and practice now make it possible to accurately and robustly position a robot manipulator relative to a target. Both the vision and control algorithms are extremely simple, but they must be initialized on task-relevant features to be applied. Consequently, they are particularly well-suited to telerobotics systems where an operator can initialize the system, but round-trip delay prohibits direct operator feedback during motion. This chapter describes the basic theory behind feature-based visual servoing and discusses the issues involved in integrating visual servoing into the ROTEX space teleoperation system.