Event-based visual servoing

Traditional visual servoing systems have been widely studied in the last years. These systems control the position of the camera attached to the robot end-effector guiding it from any position to the desired one. These controllers can be improved by using the event-based control paradigm. The system proposed in this paper is based on the idea of activating the visual controller only when something significant has occurred in the system (e.g. when any visual feature can be loosen because it is going outside the frame). Different event triggers have been defined in the image space in order to activate or deactivate the visual controller. The tests implemented to validate the proposal have proved that this new scheme avoids visual features to go out of the image whereas the system complexity is reduced considerably. Events can be used in the future to change different parameters of the visual servoing systems.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and European FEDER funds, the Valencia Regional Government and the Research and Innovation Vice-president Office of the University of Alicante, through the research projects DPI2012-32390, GV2012/102 and PROMETEO/2013/085, GRE10-16, respectively.