Location and Tracking of Robot End-effector Based on Stereo Vision

In this paper stereo vision based tracking system for humanoid robot is proposed. The goal is to locate and track the end-effector in unknown and dynamic environments. A robust approach is developed by utilizing visual features. Identical visual features such as color, disparity and adaptive template matching are used to detect and track the end-effector robustly. An improved active search method is used in order to realize effective tracking of end-effector. Active search stereo vision system of humanoid robot is designed. Two computers are embedded in to the system to realize real time robust tracking of end-effector. One computer is used for processing visual information and other one is responsible for servo control of pan-tilt platform on which CCD cameras are mounted. The performance of the developed modular visual cues based tracking of end-effector is exploited through experiments.