Visual servoing in the task-function framework: A contour following task

Abstract

We describe an approach to contour following unknown objects using a handeye robotic system. Relevant and sufficient feature points providing optical flow data are extracted from the edges of the target object. The desired motion of the end-effector is computed with the objective of keeping the visual features always at the same target location in the image plane. A cartesian PD controller is used to perform the desired motion by the robot's end-effector. To address thecontrol issues, we take advantage of the unifying robot control theory stated in the literature as thetask-function approach [21]. To validate our approach, we restricted our experiments to motionless objects positioned in a plane parallel to the image plane: three degrees of freedom (two of translation, one of rotation) are thus controlled.