Dual-Hemispherical Photometric Visual Servoing

Abstract

It is well established that wide field of view cameras, as well as using the whole photometric information contained in images, offer many advantages for visual servoing. Therefore, we propose to extend the photometric visual servoing to full spherical cameras. More precisely, we are dealing with 360-degree optical rigs composed of two wide-angle lenses oriented in opposite directions that capture everything around the device in one acquisition. The photometric visual feature coupled to dual-hemispherical acquisitions that contain the whole surrounding scene provide useful complementary information, showing large convergence domains, straighter camera trajectories than with a single hemispherical camera, and high accuracy. We report thorough simulations and several challenging real experiments using a 6 degrees-of-freedom robotic arm controlled from dual-hemispherical acquisitions.