Feature based robotic visual tracking of 3-D translational motion

The authors address the problem of robotic visual tracking of a target that moves in 3-D with translational motion. The camera is mounted on the end-effector of the robotic manipulator. Use is made of simple SISO adaptive controllers in conjunction with a Cartesian robotic controller for successful tracking. The scheme does not need explicit computation of the target´s relative depth with respect to the camera frame. In addition, the relative motion of the target with respect to the camera is measured by using a cross-correlation technique called sum-of-squared differences optical flow. Experimental and simulation results are presented to show the efficacy of the proposed approach