Designing visually servoed tracking to augment camera teleoperators

There are many features to take into consideration when designing servoed vision for robot control, especially if there are redundant degrees-of-freedom (DOF). When human teleoperated platforms like rovers, booms, gantries, aircraft and submersibles are involved, visual-servoing is particularly challenging. Along with the kinematics and dynamics characteristics in the robot DOF one must consider the human-in-the-loop. Another factor that must be considered is potential motion conflicts arising from the shared man-machine control of the camera and can lead to unstable performance. When the DOF are redundant, the tracking problem becomes more complicated because there are many ways to perform tracking. This paper illustrates these issues and suggests control approaches to resolve them.