Robot motion control from a visual memory

This article presents a new approach for robot motion control, using images acquired by an on-board camera. A particularity of this method is that it can avoid reconstructing the entire scene without limiting the displacements possible. To achieve this, an image base of the environment is used to describe the navigation space. We extract from this base a sequence of overlapping images which define the zone that the robot must traverse, in order to reach the desired position. Motions are computed on-line using only points of interest extracted from these images. A method based on potential field theory has been adapted in order to ensure a sufficient visibility of these features during the entire motion of the robot. Experimental results obtained on a six degrees of freedom robotic system are presented and confirm the validity of our approach.