Introduction to visual servoing

Some basics on visual servoing

Visual Servoing (VS) is a key technology in robotics which enables the robot to move in order to track an object in the robot’s camera. VS enables a robot to keep its focus on an object without allowing the object to escape its field of view. As you can imagine, VS has a lot of use cases in robots. The simplest use case is to ensure that the robot is always facing you while talking to you. Complex use cases can be in security robots which use VS to track introducing people or objects.

In order to see how VS can be effective in robots, you could look at some vidoes of our beloved robot, the Petoi Bittle. Bittle has an optional accessory called the Intelligent Camera module. The following videos provide some great illustrations on how a Bittle equipped with an Intelligent Camera module can effectively track an object. Bittle changes its orientation using its eight degrees of freedom while tracking the movement of the ball. You can see how responsive Bittle is to the movement of the ball.