Uncalibrated visual servoing for intuitive human guidance of robots

We propose a novel implementation of visual servoing whereby a human operator can guide a robot relative to the coordinate frame of an eye-in-hand camera. Among other applications, this can allow the operator to work in the image space of the eye-in-hand camera. This is achieved using a gamepad, a time-of-flight camera (an active sensor that creates depth data), and recursive least-squares update with Gauss-Newton control. Contributions of this paper include the use of a person to cause the control action in a visual-servoing system, and the introduction of uncalibrated position-based visual servoing. The system's efficacy is evaluated via trials involving human operators in different scenarios.