A position based visual tracking system for a 7 DOF robot manipulator using a Kinect camera

This paper presents a position based visual tracking system of a redundant manipulator using a Kinect camera. Kinect camera provides 3-D information of a target object, therefore the control algorithm of the position-based visual servoing (PBVS) can be simplified, as there is no requirement to estimate a 3-D feature point position from the extracted image and the camera model. The Kalman filter is used to predict the target position and velocity. This control method is applied to a calibrated robotic system with eye-to-hand configuration. The stability analysis has been derived and real-time experiments have been carried out using a 7 DOF PowerCube manipulator from Amtec Robotic. The experimental results of both static and moving targets are presented to demonstrate and to verify the proposed position based visual tracking system performance.