VIMANCO: Vision Manipulation of Non-Cooperative Objects

This paper presents the work performed in the context of the VIMANCO on-going project. It has the objective of improving the autonomy, safety and robustness of robotics system using vision. Vision is certainly the most adequate exteroceptive sensor to deal with complex and varying environments and for manipulation tasks of non cooperative objects. The approach we propose is based on an up-to-date recognition and 3D tracking method that features many advantages with respect to other approaches. First of all, it allows to determine if a known object is visible on only one image. It also allows to compute its pose and to track it in real time along the image sequence acquired by the camera, even in the presence of varying lighting conditions, partial occlusions, and aspects changes. The robustness of the proposed method has been achieved by combining an efficient low level image processing step, statistical techniques to take into account potential outliers, and a formulation of the registration step as a closed loop minimization scheme. This approach is valid if only one camera observes the object, but can also be applied to a multi-cameras system. Finally, this approach provides all the necessary data for the manipulation of non cooperative objects using the general formalism of visual servoing, which is a closed loop control scheme on visual data expressed either in the image, or in 3D, or even in both spaces simultaneously. This formalism can be applied whatever the vision sensor configuration (one or several cameras) with respect to the robot arms (eye-in-hand or eye-to-hand systems).