Visual servoing for the REEM humanoid robot´s upper body

In this paper, a framework for visual servo control of a humanoid robot´s upper body is presented. The framework is then implemented and tested on the REEM humanoid robot. The implementation is composed of 2 controllers - a head gaze control and a hand position control. The main application is precise manipulation tasks using the hand. For this, the hand controller takes top priority. The head controller is designed to keep both the hand and object in the eye field of view. For robustness, a secondary task of joint limit avoidance is implemented using the redundancy framework and a large projection operator proposed recently. For safety, joint velocity scaling is implemented. The implementation on REEM is done using the ROS and ViSP middleware. The results presented show simulations on Gazebo and experiments on the real robot. Furthermore, results with the real robot show how visual servoing is able to overcome some deficiency in REEM´s kinematic calibration.