Real time visual servoing around a complex object

In Visual servoing, most studies are concerned with robotic application with known objects. In this paper, the problem of controlling a motion by visual servoing around an unknown object is addressed. In this case, the approach is interpreted as an initial step towards a perception goal of an unmodeled object. The main goal is to perform motion with regard to the object in order to discover several viewpoint of the object. An adaptive visual servoing scheme is proposed to perform such task. The originality of our work is based on the choice and extraction of visual features in accordance with motions to be performed. The notion of invariant feature is introduced to control the navigational task around the unknown object. During experimentation, a cartesian robot connected to a real time vision system is used. A CCD camera is mounted on the end effector of the robot. The experimental results present a linkage of desired motion around different kind of objects.