Robust Visual Servoing for Object Manipulation with Large Time-Delays of Visual Information

This paper proposes a new visual servoing method for object manipulation robust to considerable time-delays of visual information. There still remain several problems in visual servoing methods although they are quite useful and effective for dexterous object manipulation. For instance, time-delays to obtain necessary information for object manipulation from visual images induce unstable behavior. The time-delays are mainly caused by low sampling rate of visual sensing system, computational cost for image processing, and latency of data transmission from visual sensor to processor. The method makes it possible to avoid such unstable behavior of the systems due to considerable time-delays using virtual object frame defined by only each joint angle. Firstly, a new control scheme for object manipulation using the virtual object frame is designed. Next, numerical simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the control scheme. Finally, experimental results are shown to demonstrate the practical usefulness of proposed method.