FPGA-based visual control of robot manipulators using dynamic perceptibility

This paper presents an implementation of a new direct visual controller based on field programmable gate arrays. This is used to perform the guidance of robot manipulators using visual information. An embedded system architecture to control a seven degrees of freedom robot is proposed taking into account the robot dynamics. Additionally, the concept of dynamic perceptibility, which provides information about the system capability to track objects using direct visual servoing, is defined. This concept is integrated in the proposed controller and implemented in the embedded system for robot and image singularity avoidance. The obtained results show how the hardware implementation of the visual control system can improve the speed performance. Additionally, different experiments are described to show the system behavior when a trajectory close to a singularity is obtained.