Adaptive Robotic Visual Tracking

Current robotic systems lack the flexibility of dynamic interaction with the environment. The use of sensors can make the robotic systems more flexible. Among the different types of sensors, visual sensors play a critical role. This paper addresses some of the issues associated with the use of a visual sensor in the feedback loop. In particular, algorithms are proposed for the solution of the robotic (hand-eye configuration) visual tracking and servoing problem. We state the problem of robotic visual tracking as a problem of combining control with computer vision. We propose the use of sum-of-squared differences (SSD) optical flow for the computation of the vector of discrete displacements. These displacements are fed to an adaptive controller (self-tuning regulator) that drives implemented three different adaptive control schemes and the results are presented in this paper.