Switching Control of Image-Based Visual Servoing With Laser Pointer in Robotic Manufacturing Systems

In this paper, an Eye-in-Hand robotic system with laser pointer is developed to detect, grasp, and assemble a planar object on a main body in robotic manufacturing systems. This paper is focused on detecting the object and moving the end effector to a position where a pump can perfectly suck up the object. A switching control of image-based visual servoing (IBVS) is designed to control the pose of the end effector with respect to the stationary object so that the image features of the planar object observed by the camera converge to the target image features for the further assembly. A 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 separate degree-of-freedom method, the proposed switch-control algorithm decouples the rotational and translational motions of the camera to avoid the inherent drawbacks of traditional IBVS. The experiments on a robotic assembly system are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.