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1.2 Sources of Inspiration

Our main inspirations come primarily from four lines of work in computer vision and robotics: visual servoing, learning by watching, reactive robots and active vision.

1.2.1 Visual Servoing

An image basedgif visual servoing system using differential visual feedback, moves robot control from world and joint space to visual space. This avoids conventional modeling by omitting the world coordinate frame altogether. Fig. 1.1 illustrates this pictorially. In addition, since the vision system provides continuous pose information, the introduction of differential visual error feedback allows precise positioning despite slight inaccuracies or simplifying approximations in the model. We contribute a novel, fully (robust) adaptive controller to this paradigm, based on non-parametric model estimation.

1.2.2 Learning by Watching

Model-based work in visual teaching of a robot, as pioneered by Kuniyoshi [Kuniyoshi et al., 1992], and Ikeuchi [Ikeuchi and Suehiro, 1992]), offers an attractive way of teaching a robot by having it observe a human carrying out a task. We seek similar natural user interfaces, but in a model free framework, and without the symbolic AI based ``understanding'' part.

In tele-assistance [Pook, 1995] a robot operates partly guided by a human and partly autonomously. Tele-assistance thus fills the gap between full autonomy, and direct control by a human tele-operator. In tele-assistance, instead of directly controlling the motor actions of a robot, the human interacts with the robot using a deictic, high-level language. Pook and Ballard have implemented such a system using a hand sign language sensed by an exoskeleton [Pook and Ballard, 1994]. In this work we present a user interface in which the robot is instructed through visual pointing.

1.2.3 Reactive Robotic Systems

The work on small mobile robots, and the subsumption architecture, pioneered by Brooks [Brooks, 1986, Brooks, 1991], shows that agents can interact with a complex and changing environment without complete models. Instead of going through a preprogrammed and inflexible sequence of actions, each action is triggered by a precondition perception that is sensitive to the environment. We advance this concept by adding closed loop control to this perceptual space, thus taking the open loop precondition perception tex2html_wrap_inline3474 action programs into closed loop precondition perception tex2html_wrap_inline3474 action tex2html_wrap_inline3474 perception tex2html_wrap_inline3480 programs, where perception tex2html_wrap_inline3480 is a goal perception, which is servoed on by a closed loop controller.

1.2.4 Active Vision

In an animate [Ballard, 1990], active, or behavioral vision system, the acquisition of visual information is not an independent, open-loop process, but instead depends on the active agent's interaction with the world. Also, the information need not represent an abstract, high-level model of the world, but instead is highly specific to the task, and represented in a form that facilitates particular operations. Visual servoing, when supplemented with on-line visual model estimation, fits into the active vision paradigm.

   figure38
Figure 1.1: The general structure of a traditional visual control system, and the ``short cut'' of the visual servoing approach. Adapted from Corke 1994.


next up previous contents
Next: 1.3 Contributions Up: 1 Introduction Previous: 1.1 The Need for

Martin Jägersand