New design of visual servoing using an uncalibrated camera and a calibrated robot

In this paper we deal with visual servoing that can control a robot arm with a camera using information of images only, without estimating 3D position and rotation of the robot arm. Here it is assumed that the robot arm is calibrated and the camera is uncalibrated. We use a pinhole camera model as the camera one. The essential notion can be show, that is, epipolar geometry, epipole, epipolar equation, and epipolar constraint. These play an important role in designing visual servoing. For easy understanding of the proposed method we first show a design in case of the calibrated camera. The design is constructed by 4 steps and the directional motion of the robot arm is fixed only to a constant direction. This means that an estimated epipole denotes the direction, to which the robot arm translates in 3D space, on the image plane.