Two-time scale visual servoing of eye-in-hand flexible manipulators

Visual servoing of eye-in-hand flexible manipulators is addressed in this paper. Dynamic effects of both the rigid and the flexible motion of the manipulator are fully taken into account in a control solution where the two-time scale nature of the problem is exploited. The visual information is used in the "slow" subsystem for a task-space-oriented control law, where computationally expensive operations, such as inverse and time derivative of the Jacobian, are avoided. A constructive proof of stability of this control scheme, based on Lyapunov theory, is also presented. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is shown by means of a numerical simulation concerning a trajectory tracking problem. Some experimental results finally demonstrate the precision enhancement achieved by the proposed algorithm on a single-link flexible manipulator.