Increasing the Tracking Region of an Eye-in-Hand System by Singularity and Joint Limit Avoidance

A new control strategy is presented which visually tracks objects using a manipulator/camera system while simultaneously avoiding kinematic singularities and joint limits by moving in directions along which the tracking task space is unconstrained or redundant. A manipulability measure is introduced into the visual servoing objective function in order to derive the control law. The algorithms developed have been experimentally verified on an eye-in-hand system. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by showing that the tracking region of a manipulator tracking objects with planar motion can be greatly increased.