Visual servoing – the next Big Thing?

Visual servoing is the process of using machine vision to guide motion. The concept is basically similar to the way a human positions something: look at current location, calculate required path to target, move, recheck location, move, and so on. It sounds rather an obvious application area, so you might be wondering why we don’t see it everywhere.

Well for a good introduction to the topic, let me refer you to “Manufacturing on the Move” (Advanced Imaging, October 29, 2009) where Kristin Lewotsky discusses the challenges and current research.

The research she covers is work underway at Purdue University. The print magazine provides a web address but unfortunately that seems to be missing from the online article, so let me provide it here: “Line Tracking for Assembly on the Fly”.

The description of the work, and the possible applications, is interesting, but what I really enjoyed were the videos showing a robot tracking a moving part. They definitely count as “pretty neat” so take a look.