A visual servoing architecture for controlling electromechanical systems

Most of the architectures employed in visual servoing research use specialised hardware and software. The high cost of the specialised hardware and the engineering skills required to develop the software complicates the set-up of visual controlled systems. The present day costs for the key elements for computer vision such as cameras, frame grabbers and computers continue to fall thus making reasonable low-cost visual architectures. We present a visual servoing architecture for controlling electromechanical systems based on standard off-the-shelf hardware and software. The proposed scheme allows us to control a wide class of systems including robot manipulators. The programming environment is based on MathLab/Simulink(R) which allows us to take advantage of the graphic programming facilities of Simulink. Two experimental evaluations are presented, a linear motion cart controlled using direct visual servoing and a planar robot arm controlled in a look and move framework.