Design of kinematic controller for real-time vision guided robot manipulators

This paper discusses the control strategies for robot manipulators to track moving targets based on realtime vision guidance. The work is motivated by some new demands of vision guided robot manipulators in which the workpieces being manipulated are in complex motion and the widely adopted look-then-move control strategy cannot give satisfactory performance. In order to serve industrial applications, the limited sensing and actuation capabilities have to be considered properly. In our work, a cascade control structure is introduced. The sensor and actuator limits are dealt with by consecutive modules in the controller respectively. In particular, the kinematic visual servoing (KVS) module is discussed in detail. It is a kinematic controller that generates reference trajectory in real-time. Sliding control is used to give a basic Jacobian-based design. Constrained optimal control is applied to address the actuator limits. validation is conducted through simulation and experiment.