A modular approach to visual servoing

This paper presents a modular control design that attempts to make visual servoing a practical tool for industrial robots. The paper develops the concept of a "visual servoing area", which can invoke itself from visual cues, serve a specific task and then return control to the original control structure. Any number of visual servoing areas can exist within the workspace of the robot(s), each having specialized software to perform a particular task. An illustrative example involving two table top manipulator arms carrying out a component assembly operation is described.