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The study and application of machine vision in early years mostly focus on a single camera. However, the trend of research on multiple cameras has been developed recently. Due to highly complicated correlation among multiple images, the arrangement of multiple cameras was restricted to the encirclement layout for acquiring more than one views of a target object. Furthermore, it has been well known that the special architecture of insect compound eyes contributes outstanding capability for precise and efficient observation of moving objects. If this technique can be transferred to the domain of engineering applications, significant improvement on visual tracking of moving objects will be greatly expected. This thesis builds a visual servo system with trinocular cameras by mimicking the configuration of compound eye of insects for tracking an object moving in 2D space. The arrangement of the trinocular cameras is divergent, and this system can function properly without the information of distance between the object and the cameras.

It has been well known that the architecture of insect compound eyes contributes outstanding capability for precise and efficient observation of moving objects. If this technique can be transferred to the domain of engineering applications, significant improvement on visual tracking of moving objects will be greatly expected. The brightness variation, caused by relative velocity of the camera and environment in a sequence of images, is called optical flow. The advantage of the optical-flow-based visual servo methods is that features of the moving object do not have to be known in advance. Therefore, they can be applied for general positioning and tracking tasks. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a visual servo system with trinocular cameras. For mimicking the configuration of compound eyes of insects, the arrangement of the divergent trinocular cameras is applied. In order to overcome possible difficulties of unknown or uncertain parameters, an image servo technique using the robust discrete-time sliding-mode control algorithm to track an object moving in 2D space is developed.