Visual servoing of robots with uncalibrated robot and camera parameters

Abstract

This paper presents a new controller to regulate a set of feature points on the image plane to desired positions by controlling motion of a robot manipulator in uncalibrated environments. This controller is designed to cope with both the unknown camera parameters and the unknown robot parameters. The controller employs the depth-independent image Jacobian matrix to map the image errors onto the joint space of the manipulator. Based on the fact that the unknown camera and robot parameters appear linearly in the closed-loop dynamics of the system if the depth-independent image Jacobian is used, an adaptive algorithm was developed to estimate the unknown parameters on-line. With a full consideration of dynamic responses of the robot manipulator, the convergence of the image errors on the image plane to zero was proved by the Lyapunov method. Simulation and experiments have been conducted to demonstrate good convergence of the trajectory errors under the control of the proposed method.