A VISION-BASED POSITION CONTROL-SYSTEM FOR A ONE-LINK FLEXIBLE ARM

Abstract

A video system is a good tool for measuring the geometric shape of a beam, This contactless measurement system is able to provide digitized displacement data for the entire beam with a single transducer. However, it has rarely been implemented for real-time operations since the speeds of previous image processing schemes has been too slow. In this paper, a multi-processor system have been built to control a flexible arm with image feedbacks. Several schemes are proposed to reduce the image processing time and to increase its accuracy. The vibration displacements of the entire beam are measured by the vision system with a sampling rate of 60 Hz. From this data, the vibration states can be calculated indirectly. Using these state feedbacks, some experiments on the control of the tip position of an one-link flexible arm have been performed.