Controlling the manipulator of an underwater ROV using a coarse calibrated pan/tilt camera

We present a vision-based method to control the displacement of robot arm mounted on an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV). A closed-loop system based on an eye-to-hand visual servoing approach has been designed to achieve this task. We show that, using such an approach, the measuring of the manipulator motion with proprioceptive sensors is not required to precisely control the end-effector motion. To maintain the end effector in the field of view, the camera orientation is also controlled. The results presented show the validity of the approach.