Special Issue on Visual Servoing

Abstract

Robots able to imitate human beings have been at the core of stories of science fiction as well as dreams of inventors since long time. Visual servoing has received great attention in recent years as it enables robotic systems to imitate humans in positioning tasks by exploiting artificial vision. Indeed, visual servoing has numerous and various applications, such as industrial manufacture, surveillance, vehicles control, operations in dangerous environments, motion control, and surgery. Pioneering visual servoing approaches focused their attention on simple images features and control laws in order to result in low computational complexities and hence being suitable for real-time applications. Recently, developments in system hardware and optimization algorithms make efficient and viable the exploitation of sophisticated techniques in visual servoing, thus allowing to consider complex scenarios and derive powerful solutions in many applications.