Optimal Image-Based Guidance of Mobile Manipulators using Direct Visual Servoing

This paper presents a direct image-based controller to perform the guidance of a mobile manipulator using image-based control. An eye-in-hand camera is employed to perform the guidance of a mobile differential platform with a seven degrees-of-freedom robot arm. The presented approach is based on an optimal control framework and it is employed to control mobile manipulators during the tracking of image trajectories taking into account robot dynamics. The direct approach allows us to take both the manipulator and base dynamics into account. The proposed image-based controllers consider the optimization of the motor signals sent to the mobile manipulator during the tracking of image trajectories by minimizing the control force and torque. As the results show, the proposed direct visual servoing system uses the eye-in-hand camera images for concurrently controlling both the base platform and robot arm. The use of the optimal framework allows us to derive different visual controllers with different dynamical behaviors during the tracking of image trajectories.