Position-based visual servo control of autonomous robotic manipulators

Abstract

This paper concerns the position-based visual servo control of autonomous robotic manipulators in space. It focuses on the development of a real-time vision-based pose and motion estimation algorithm of a non-cooperative target by photogrammetry and extended Kalman filter for robotic manipulators to perform autonomous capture. Optical flow algorithm is adopted to track the target features in order to improve the image processing efficiency. Then, a close-loop position-based visual servo control strategy is devised to determine the desired pose of the end-effector at the rendezvous point based on the estimated pose and motion of the target. The corresponding desired joint angles of the robotic manipulator in the joint space are derived by the inverse kinematics of the robotic manipulator. The developed algorithm and position-based visual servo control strategy are validated experimentally by a custom built robotic manipulator with an eye-in-hand configuration. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed estimation algorithm and control scheme are feasible and effective.