Visual tracking of robots in uncalibrated environments

This paper presents a new adaptive controller for visual tracking control of a robot manipulator in 3D general motion with a fixed camera whose intrinsic and extrinsic parameters are uncalibrated. In addition to camera parameters, the feature positions are also assumed unknown. Based on the fact that the unknown parameters appears linearly in the closed-loop dynamics of the system if the depth-independent interaction matrix is adopted to map the image errors onto the joint space of the manipulator, a new adaptive algorithm was developed to estimated the unknown parameters on-line. With a full consideration of dynamic responses of the robot manipulator, the Lyapunov method is employed to prove asymptotic convergence of the image errors. Simulation and experiment results are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.