Teach by zooming: A unified approach to visual servo control

Traditionally, a visual servo control problem is formulated in the teach by showing framework with an objective to regulate a camera based on a reference (or desired) image obtained by a priori positioning the same camera at the desired task-space location. A new strategy is essential for a variety of applications where it may not be possible to position the camera a priori at the desired position/orientation. In this paper, a visual servo control approach, called “teach by zooming”, is formulated where the objective is to position/orient a camera based on a reference image obtained by another camera. For example, a fixed camera providing a wide area view of the scene can zoom in on an object and record a desired image for another camera. A non-linear Lyapunov-based controller is designed to regulate the image features acquired by an on-board camera to the corresponding image feature coordinates in the desired image acquired by the fixed camera in the presence of uncertain camera calibration parameters. The proposed control formulation becomes identical to the well-known teach by showing controller when the camera-in-hand can be located a priori to the desired position/orientation; thus enabling control in a wide range of applications. Experimental results for regulation control of a 7 degrees-of-freedom robotic manipulator are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed visual servo controller.