Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

Research activities of the Lagadic team are concerned with visual servoing and active vision. Visual servoing consists in using the information provided by a vision sensor to control the movements of a dynamic system. This system can be real within the framework of robotics, or virtual within the framework of computer animation or augmented reality. This research topic is at the intersection of the fields of robotics, automatic control, and computer vision. These fields are the subject of profitable research since many years and are particularly interesting by their very broad scientific and application spectrum. Within this spectrum, we focus ourselves on the interaction between visual perception and action. This topic is significant because it provides an alternative to the traditional Perception-Decision-Action cycle. It is indeed possible to link more closely the perception and action aspects, by directly integrating the measurements provided by a vision sensor in closed loop control laws.

This set of themes of visual servoing is the central scientific topic of the Lagadic group. More generally, our objective is to design strategies of coupling perception and action from images for applications in robotics, computer vision, virtual reality and augmented reality.

This objective is significant, first of all because of the variety and the great number of potential applications to which can lead our work. Secondly, it is also significant to be able to raise the scientific aspects associated with these problems, namely modeling of visual features representing in an optimal way the interaction between action and perception, taking into account of complex environments and the specification of high level tasks. We also work to treat new problems provided by imagery systems such as those resulting from an omnidirectional vision sensor or echographic probes. We are finally interested in revisiting traditional problems in computer vision (3D localization, structure and motion) through the visual servoing approach.