Survey of Visual and Force/Tactile Control of Robots for Physical Interaction in Spain

Sensors provide robotic systems with the information required to perceive the changes that happen in unstructured environments and modify their actions accordingly. The robotic controllers which process and analyze this sensory information are usually based on three types of sensors (visual, force/torque and tactile) which identify the most widespread robotic control strategies: visual servoing control, force control and tactile control. This paper presents a detailed review on the sensor architectures, algorithmic techniques and applications which have been developed by Spanish researchers in order to implement these mono-sensor and multi-sensor controllers which combine several sensors

Avoiding Robot Joint Limits and Kinematic Singularities in Visual Servoing

We propose in this paper solutions to avoid the joint limits and kinematic singularities in visual servoing. We use a control scheme based on the task function approach. It combines the regulation of the selected vision-based task with the minimization of a secondary cost function, which reflects the manipulability of the robot in the vicinity of joint limits and singularities. 1. Introduction In robotics, and in visual servoing in particular, it is important to avoid the manipulator joint limits and the kinematic singularities. Joint limits are physical limits to the extension of the operational space of the robot, and singularities are peculiar configurations where the manipulator locally looses a degree of freedom. Thus, for such situations, some motions are impossible to be realized Dealing with visual servoing [7][5], which is a closed loop reacting to image data, planning the camera trajectory is not possible. If the control law computes a motion that exceeds a joint limit, or i..