Pose alignment of an eye-in-hand system using image morphing

Positioning an eye-in-hand robotic system with respect to a static target is a challenging research problem since it involves recognition of the object and the desired pose at which alignment is to occur, planning a trajectory for the robot to attain this pose, and careful calibration of the system and the environment. In this paper we introduce a unified framework based on image morphing, to address the above problems and apply it to the task of translational and rotational alignment of an eye-in-hand system to planar objects or planar projections of 3D objects. In our method the desired manipulator pose for each object is defined and stored as a view of the object taken from this pose. The identity of an unknown object in the workspace is established by morphing its image to the views in the database, and using a quantification of the morph as a dissimilarity measure. The synthetic images generated during the morph are used guide an eye-in-hand system to the desired pose. The framework can accommodate partially occluded or deformable targets and smooth trajectories can be generated since an arbitrary number of intermediate images can be used.