Trajectory Snakes for Robotic Motion Tracking

Robotic motion trajectory maintains continuousness and smoothness in spatial-temporal space. A novel trajectory snake model is proposed for visual tracking of moving manipulator. Snake energy function of robotic motion is defined involving kinematic energy, curve potential and image potential energy. The motion trajectory can be located through searching the converged energy distribution of the snake function. Energy weights in the function are real-time adjusted to avoid local minima during convergence. To improve snake searching efficiency, quadratic-trajectory least square estimator is employed to predict manipulator motion position before tracking. A fast visual tracking algorithm based on the trajectory snake model is developed and experimental results of tracking micromanipulator motion demonstrate its performance