Visual Servoing Via Advanced Numerical Methods

The text of Visual Servoing via Advanced Numerical Methods has its roots in an invited session presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation at Kobe in May 2009. The work presented here has been much expanded and gives a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in this important area of robotics. The latest contributions from well-known experts in visual servoing provide the reader with solutions to the fundamental and specific problems that have to be solved in using camera-derived feedback to control robotic motion and make it imitative of the actions of human beings. These solutions are based on dedicated numerical methods the development of which has been facilitated by recent progress in video devices, computer hardware and optimisation techniques. The book is organised into three parts reflecting: the uses of image processing and computer vision; control, optimal and robust control; and stability, performance and robustness analysis in visual servoing.

Graziano Chesi received the Laurea in Information Engineering from the University of Florence (1997) and the Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Bologna (2001). He was with the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Siena (2000-2006) and then joined the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Hong Kong (2006-present). He was a visiting scientist at the Department of Engineering of the University of Cambridge (1999-2000) and at the Department of Information Physics and Computing of the University of Tokyo (2001-2004). Dr. Chesi was the recipient of the Best Student Award of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Florence (1997). He was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2005-2009) and Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Positive Polynomials in Control of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2009). Since 2007 he is Associate Editor of Automatica. He is the Founder and Chair of the Technical Committee on Systems with Uncertainty of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is author of the book "Homogeneous Polynomial Forms for Robustness Analysis of Uncertain Systems" (Springer, 2009) and editor of the book "Visual Servoing via Advanced Numerical Methods" (Springer, 2010). He is first author in more than 100 technical publications.Koichi Hashimoto is a Professor at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University. He received his BS, MS and DE degrees from Osaka University in 1985, 1987 and 1990, respectively. His major research interests include visual servoing, parallel processing and biological systems.Prof. Hashimoto is a member of IEEE, RSJ, SICE, ISCIE, IPSJ and JSME. He is the Editor of the book Visual Servoing: Real-Time Control of Robot Manipulators Based on Visual Sensory Feedback, World Scientific, 1993, and the book Control and Modeling of Complex Systems, Birkhauser, 2003.