Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:56:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AnfranseraiMD.pdf: 2426744 bytes, checksum: d0579aab855282deeac9bb5717c5ab5a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2002-08-02 / In conventional robot manipulator control, the desired path is specified in cartesian space and converted to joint space through inverse kinematics mapping. The joint references generated by this mapping are utilized for dynamic control in joint space. Thus, the end-effector position is, in fact, controlled indirectly, in open-loop, and the accuracy of grip position control directly depends on the accuracy of the available kinematic model. In this report, a new scheme for redundant manipulator kinematic control, based on visual servoing is proposed. In the proposed system, a robot image acquired through a CCD camera is processed in order to compute the position and orientation of each link of the robot arm. The robot task is specified as a temporal sequence of reference images of the robot arm. Thus, both the measured pose and the reference pose are specified in the same image space, and its difference is utilized to generate a cartesian space error for kinematic control purposes. The proposed control scheme was applied in a four degree-of-freedom planar redundant robot arm, experimental results are shown / No controle convencional de manipuladores rob?ticos, a trajet?ria desejada ? especificada em espa?o cartesiano e mapeada para espa?o de juntas atrav?s do modelo cinem?tico inverso do manipulador. As novas refer?ncias assim geradas s?o utilizadas para fins de controle din?mico em espa?o de juntas, desde modo a posi??o da garra ? controlada efetivamente em malha aberta e a precis?o do controle depende diretamente da precis?o do modelo cinem?tico dispon?vel. Esta disserta??o apresenta um novo algoritmo de controle cinem?tico para bra?os redundantes baseado em realimenta??o visual. No sistema proposto, a imagem do rob? ? captada por uma c?mera e processada, para obter a posi??o e orienta??o de cada um dos elos do rob?. A trajet?ria do rob? ? especificada na forma de uma seq??ncia temporal de imagens de refer?ncia do bra?o rob?tico. Assim, ambas as poses, a medida e a de refer?ncia s?o especificadas no mesmo espa?o de imagem e a sua diferen?a ? utilizada para gerar um erro em espa?o cartesiano para prop?sitos de controle cinem?tico. O esquema de controle proposto foi aplicado a um manipulador redundante planar de quatro graus de liberdade, resultados experimentais s?o apresentados

This thesis investigates the problem of robot navigation using only landmark bearings. The proposed system allows a robot to move to a ground target location specified by the sensor values observed at this ground target posi- tion. The control actions are computed based on the difference between the current landmark bearings and the target landmark bearings. No Cartesian coordinates with respect to the ground are computed by the control system. The robot navigates using solely information from the bearing sensor space. Most existing robot navigation systems require a ground frame (2D Cartesian coordinate system) in order to navigate from a ground point A to a ground point B. The commonly used sensors such as laser range scanner, sonar, infrared, and vision do not directly provide the 2D ground coordi- nates of the robot. The existing systems use the sensor measurements to localise the robot with respect to a map, a set of 2D coordinates of the objects of interest. It is more natural to navigate between the points in the sensor space corresponding to A and B without requiring the Cartesian map and the localisation process. Research on animals has revealed how insects are able to exploit very limited computational and memory resources to successfully navigate to a desired destination without computing Cartesian positions. For example, a honeybee balances the left and right optical flows to navigate in a nar- row corridor. Unlike many other ants, Cataglyphis bicolor does not secrete pheromone trails in order to find its way home but instead uses the sun as a compass to keep track of its home direction vector. The home vector can be inaccurate, so the ant also uses landmark recognition. More precisely, it takes snapshots and compass headings of some landmarks. To return home, the ant tries to line up the landmarks exactly as they were before it started wandering. This thesis introduces a navigation method based on reflex actions in sensor space. The sensor vector is made of the bearings of some landmarks, and the reflex action is a gradient descent with respect to the distance in sensor space between the current sensor vector and the target sensor vec- tor. Our theoretical analysis shows that except for some fully characterized pathological cases, any point is reachable from any other point by reflex action in the bearing sensor space provided the environment contains three landmarks and is free of obstacles. The trajectories of a robot using reflex navigation, like other image- based visual control strategies, do not correspond necessarily to the shortest paths on the ground, because the sensor error is minimized, not the moving distance on the ground. However, we show that the use of a sequence of waypoints in sensor space can address this problem. In order to identify relevant waypoints, we train a Self Organising Map (SOM) from a set of observations uniformly distributed with respect to the ground. This SOM provides a sense of location to the robot, and allows a form of path planning in sensor space. The navigation proposed system is analysed theoretically, and evaluated both in simulation and with experiments on a real robot.