Robotic Inserting a Moving Object Using Visual-Based Control With Time-Delay Compensator

Tracking-and-inserting a moving peg using a robot manipulator is a challenging task in manufacturing. In the past decades, various visual-based methods have been proposed for robotic manipulating static targets, which usually ignore the time delay in robot command transmission and image processing. However, for tracking and inserting a moving peg, time delays cannot be overlooked because they can reduce the tracking performance and even cause manipulations to fail. In this article, a robot visual-based control with a time-delay compensator is presented to solve the problem of inserting a moving peg. The time-delay compensator was designed using radial basis function neural network, a feedback compensator aimed at eliminating the tracking errors caused by the time delays. Thus, we could manipulate a moving object using a commercial industry robot, even with the time-variant delays in the control loop. Furthermore, the visual-based controller with the pseudoinverse image Jacobian matrix was designed using a linearization model. Thus, the matrix could be efficiently updated using the model. In the experiment, we inserted a peg into a moving hole using an eye-in-hand robot with precision.