IRI-9613737 University of Illinois-Champaign Hutchinson, Seth (Jointly funded with the Office of Cross Disciplinary Activities $50,025 - 36 mos Total award--$100,025) CONACyT: Visual Servo Control of Robotic Systems This award, under the NSF-CONACyT initiative, funds a collaboration with researchers at the Centro de Investigacion Cientifica y de Educacion Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) in Ensenada, Mexico. The goal of the collaboration is to combine expanded research in visual servo control of robotic manipulators at the University of Illinois with research on dynamics and control at CICSE. This should enable consideration of robot dynamics in the design and evaluation of visual servo controllers, thereby yielding active visual systems of more robust design. The research, which has previously focused on geometric aspects, will be expanded to include the system dynamics. The research at CICSE will develop a framework for evaluating a class of visual servo controllers and will also yield a basis for performing rigorous stability analyses. This should lead to new capabilities for engineering robotic systems in which the camera placement and the robot configuration for manipulability can be optimized simultaneously. That could expand the range of potential applications of visual servoing, especially to situations involving moving obstacles and target objects that are moving in the scene.
