Approach to a visual tracking algorithm for a fast motion of an object

This paper describes a visual tracking control according to moving speed of target object. In case the target object has a quick motion, it goes out of sight easily in the vision based manipulation system. To avoid such an emergent motion, this paper introduces two tracking modes. One is normal tracking mode. The other is emergent tracking mode. When the target object changes its moving speed and orientation, control mode is switched to the emergent tracking mode. Furthermore in the proposed approach, the performed index to evaluate the recognizable ability of the vision based manipulation system is introduced. The more that index increases, the easier the manipulator system tracks the motion of the target object. In other words, it is utilized for the smooth mode switching according to the emergent motion. Also the motion command is adjusted continuously by the estimation of the object speed so that the manipulator catches the losing object. This makes it possible to avoid the unacceptable motion caused by the unknown disturbance. The validity of the proposed approach is confirmed by several numerical and experimental results.