Dynamic visual tracking for manipulators using an uncalibrated fixed camera

This paper presents a new controller for controlling a number of feature points on a robot manipulator to trace desired trajectories specified on the image plane of a fixed camera. It is assumed that the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the camera are not calibrated. A new adaptive algorithm is developed to estimate the unknown parameters online, based on three original ideas. First, we use the pseudoinverse of the depth-independent interaction matrix to map the image errors onto the joint space of the manipulator. By eliminating the depths in the interaction matrix, we can linearly parameterize the closed-loop dynamics of the manipulator. Second, to guarantee the existence of the pseudoinverse, the adaptive algorithm introduces a potential force to drive the estimated parameters away from the values that result in a singular Jacobian matrix. Third, to ensure that the estimated parameters are convergent to their true values up to a scale, we combine the Slotine-Li method with an online algorithm for minimizing the error between the estimated projections and real image coordinates of the feature points. We have proved asymptotic convergence of the image errors to zero by the Lyapunov theory based on the nonlinear robot dynamics. Experiments have been carried out to verify the performance of the proposed controller.