Eye-in-Hand Visual Servoing Curriculum

In this 2.5 hour exercise students will learn to control a robot arm using a small video camera so its movements track a ball. The general idea of using a camera to continuously drive the motion of a robot to satisfy some goal is called visual servoing. In our case, the camera is mounted on the arm itself, near the gripper, in an eye-in-hand configuration. First students will learn about the kinematics of the arm by performing a few preliminary experiments. Then students will learn about the image processing steps used to detect the location of the ball relative to the camera. Finally, students will put these two capabilities together to make the arm follow the ball as you move it around.