Providing synthetic views for teleoperation using visual pose tracking in multiple cameras

This paper describes a visual tool for teleoperative experimentation involving remote manipulation and contact tasks. Using modest hardware, it recovers in real time the pose of moving polyhedral objects, and presents a synthetic view of the scene to the operator of a teleoperated robot using any chosen viewpoint and viewing direction. To recover pose, the method of line tracking first introduced by Harris (1992) is extended to multiple calibrated cameras, and its dynamic performance improved using robust methods and iterative filtering. Experiments are reported which determine the static and dynamic performance of the vision system, and its use in teleoperation is illustrated in two experiments, a peg-in-hole manipulation task and an impact control task.