Uncalibrated 3D visual servoing from epipolar geometry and projective invariants

Visual servoing is being widely investigated as a robot control method that is robust to unpredictable disturbances. Conventional visual servoing assumes calibration of the robot and camera, but such calibration proves very difficult in practice. Thus, we have proposed a method of stable visual servoing for a robot moving on a plane, with neither the robot nor its camera being calibrated. In this paper, we extend the previous method to 3D projective space, thus providing visual servoing for general uncalibrated robots operated in 3D space. In particular, we show that invariant properties in projective space defined by means of epipolar geometry play an important role in navigation. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 90(12): 50–58, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20361