Increasing the tracking region of an eye-in-hand system by singularity and joint limit avoidance

A control strategy is presented that visually tracks objects using a manipulator/camera system while simultaneously avoiding kinematic singularities and joint limits by moving in directions along which the tracking task space is unconstrained or redundant. A manipulability measure is introduced into the visual servoing objective function in order to derive the control law. The algorithms developed are experimentally verified on an eye-in-hand system. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by showing that the tracking region of a manipulator tracking objects with planar motion can be greatly increased