Global path planning for robust Visual Servoing in complex environments

We incorporate sampling-based global path planning with Visual Servoing (VS) for a robotic arm equipped with an in-hand camera. The path planning accounts for a number of constraints: 1) maintaining continuous visibility of the target within the camera's field of view, 2) avoiding visual occlusion of target features caused by the workspace obstacles, robot's body, or the target itself, 3) avoiding collision with physical obstacles or self collision, and 4) joint limits. Incorporating these constraints enhances the applicability of VS to significantly more complex environments/tasks, thereby making the resulting VS much more robust. The proposed planner explores the camera space, i.e. 3D Cartesian space, for permissible camera paths satisfying the aforementioned constraints by iteratively extending a search tree in camera space and simultaneously tracking these paths in the robot's joint space using a local planner. The planned camera path is then projected into the image space and tracked using an image-based visual servoing scheme. The validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach in accomplishing VS tasks in complex environments are demonstrated through a number of simulations on a 6-dof robot arm moving among obstacles.