On the use of snakes for 3-D robotic visual tracking

A new approach for robotic visual tracking and servoing is discussed. Deformable active models are introduced as a powerful means for tracking a moving rigid object (an eye-in-hand robot arm is used). Deformable models imitate, in real-time, the dynamic behavior of elastic structures. These computer-generated models are designed to capture the silhouette of rigid objects with well defined boundaries in terms of image gradient. By means of an eye-in-hand robot arm configuration, the desired motion of the end-effector is computed with the objective of keeping the target´s position and shape invariant with respect to the camera frame. Experimental results are presented for the tracking of a rigid object moving in the three-dimensional space