Switching control of image based visual servoing with laser pointer in robotic assembly systems

In this paper, a switching control of Image Based Visual Servoing (IBVS) with laser pointer is introduced to control the pose of the end effector with respect to the stationary object in a robotic assembly system so that the image features observed by the camera reach the desired image features as fast as possible. The simple off-the-shelf laser pointer is adopted to realize the depth estimation for obtaining the image Jacobian matrices. By using a laser spot as an image feature and the partition Degree-Of-Freedom (DOF) method, the proposed switching control algorithm decouples the rotational and translational motion control of the robotic end effector to avoid the inherent drawbacks of traditional IBVS, such as image singularities, image local minima and relative long trajectory in Cartesian space. The experimental results on a robotic assembly system are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.