Real-time Visual Servoing

This paper describes a new real-time tracking algorithm in conjunction with a predictive filter to allow real-time visual servoing of a robotic arm that is following a moving object. The system consists of two calibrated (but unregistered) cameras that provide images to a real-time, pipelined-parallel optic-flow algorithm that can robustly compute optic-flow and calculate the 3-D position of a moving object at approximately 5 Hz rates. These 3-D positions of the moving object serve as input to a predictive kinematic control algorithm that uses an α − β − γ filter to update the position of a robotic arm tracking the moving object. Experimental results are presented for the tracking of a moving model train in a variety of different trajectories.