Visual end‐effector position error compensation for planetary robotics

AbstractThis paper describes a vision‐guided manipulation algorithm that improves arm end‐effector positioning to subpixel accuracy and meets the highly restrictive imaging and computational constraints of a planetary robotic flight system. Analytical, simulation‐based, and experimental analyses of the algorithm's effectiveness and sensitivity to camera and arm model error is presented along with results on several prototype research systems and “ground‐in‐the‐loop” technology experiments on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) vehicles. A computationally efficient and robust subpixel end‐effector fiducial detector that is instrumental to the algorithm's ability to achieve high accuracy is also described along with its validation results on MER data. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.