Uncalibrated hand-eye coordination with a redundant camera system

We describe a method for 3D visual manipulator control using a redundant camera system without explicit external or internal calibration. Under the assumption of a simple linear camera model a fusion equation is derived for which only three parameters have to be estimated regardless of the number of cameras. In simulations as well as in real experiments the feasibility of our approach for a 3D positioning task of a six degree of freedom (DOF) Puma 200 to a target is demonstrated. It is shown that using redundant views increases positioning accuracy and fault tolerance. The achieved accuracy is sufficient to perform an additional insertion task