A tutorial on visual servo control

TLDR

This tutorial introduces visual servo control of robotic manipulators, offering a basic conceptual framework across robotics and computer vision disciplines. The tutorial reviews foundational robotics and computer vision concepts, presents a taxonomy of visual servo systems, details position‑based and image‑based classes, and discusses feature‑ and correlation‑based tracking methods. The authors conclude with observations on emerging research directions in visual servo control.

Abstract

This article provides a tutorial introduction to visual servo control of robotic manipulators. Since the topic spans many disciplines our goal is limited to providing a basic conceptual framework. We begin by reviewing the prerequisite topics from robotics and computer vision, including a brief review of coordinate transformations, velocity representation, and a description of the geometric aspects of the image formation process. We then present a taxonomy of visual servo control systems. The two major classes of systems, position-based and image-based systems, are then discussed in detail. Since any visual servo system must be capable of tracking image features in a sequence of images, we also include an overview of feature-based and correlation-based methods for tracking. We conclude the tutorial with a number of observations on the current directions of the research field of visual servo control.