Visual Estimation and Control of Robot Manipulating Systems
Paolo Robuffo Giordano · 2008
All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things. – Aristotle With this sentence from his Metaphysica, Aristotle perfectly introduces us to theimportance of eyesight for humans, as well as for any advanced living being. Since, toa large extent, robotics is concerned with the emulation of human skills in an artificial context, a natural requirement is to cope with vision for a full interaction with the world. In this respect, this Thesis explores the problem of exploiting visual information to control the motion of robotic systems equipped with onboard cameras. We build our proposals upon the Visual Servoing paradigm, which bridges Computer Vision (image processing, scene interpretation, feature extraction, etc.) with topics proper to the Control Theory field. Indeed, within Visual Servoing, a camera is modeled as a nonlinear function of the scene, i.e., of 3D states subject to