A Dense and Direct Approach to Visual Servoing Using Depth Maps

• Published in: IEEE transactions on robotics Vol. 30; no. 5; pp. 1242 - 1249
• Main Authors: Teuliere, Celine, Marchand, Eric
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2014; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: 3-D technology; Computer Science; Dense sensor-based control; depth map; Feature extraction; Information management; Mapping; Navigation; Performance evaluation; Rendering; Robot kinematics; Robotics; Robots; Sensors; Solid modeling; Tasks; Three dimensional; Visual servoing; Dense sensor-based control; depth map; visual servoing
• ISSN: 1552-3098; 1941-0468
• DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2014.2325991

This paper presents a novel 3-D servoing approach using dense depth maps to perform robotic tasks. With respect to position-based approaches, our method does not require the estimation of the 3-D pose (direct), nor the extraction and matching of 3-D features (dense), and only requires dense depth maps provided by 3-D sensors. Our approach has been validated in various servoing experiments using the depth information from a low-cost Red Green Blue-Depth (RGB-D) sensor. Positioning tasks are properly achieved despite noisy measurements, even when partial occlusions or scene modifications occur. We also show that, in cases where a reference depth map cannot be easily available, synthetic ones generated with a rendering engine still lead to satisfactory positioning performances. Application of the approach to the navigation of a mobile robot is also demonstrated.