A Direct Approach to Vision Guided Manipulation

This paper describes a method for robotic manipulation that uses direct image-space calculation of optical flow information for continuous real-time control of manipulative actions. State variables derived from optical flow measurements are described. The resulting approach is advantageous since it robustifies the system to changes in optical parameters and also simplifies the implementation needed to succeed in the task execution. Two reference tasks and their corresponding experiments are described: the insertion of a pen into a "cap" (the capping experiment) and the rotational point-contact pushing of an object of unknown shape, mass and friction to a specified goal point in the image-space.