Joint-coupled compensation effects in visually servoed tracking

Humans have degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of varying bandwidths and one casually observes that we coordinate these DOF while visually tracking. This suggests that joint interplay aids tracking performance. In a control scheme we call partitioning, both image and kinematic data are used to visually-servo a 5-DOF robot by defining a joint-coupling among the rotational and translational DOF. Analysis of simulations and experiments reveal that a robot's fast bandwidth joints physically serve as lead compensators when coupled to slower joints thus reducing tracking lag.