Feature-based visual servoing and its application to telerobotics

Advances in visual servoing theory and practice now make it possible to accurately and robustly position a robot manipulator relative to a target. Both the vision and control algorithms are extremely simple, however they must be initialized on task-relevant features in order to be applied. Consequently, they are particularly well-suited to telerobotics systems where an operator can initialize the system but round-trip delay prohibits direct operator feedback during motion. This paper describes the basic theory behind feature-based visual servoing, and discusses the issues involved in integrating visual servoing into the ROTEX space teleoperation system