Uncalibrated Visual Servo Control of Robot Manipulators with Uncertain Kinematics

It is often desired to describe the control objective for a robotic application in terms of the task-space; hence, the robot kinematics are required to relate the task-space control objective to the joint-space control input. Most of the previous robot controllers assume that the robot kinematics and manipulator Jacobian are perfectly known. In this paper, a joint space controller is coupled with an image-based path planner for end-effector regulation tasks in the presence of uncertain camera calibration, nonlinear distortion effects, and uncertainty in the manipulator Jacobian. Development is first presented for a planar case followed by simulation results. The approach is then extended to the 6 degree-of-freedom case for the camera-in-hand configuration