Visual Servoing in Autoencoder Latent Space

Overview & Synopsis

Visual servoing (VS) is a common way in robotics to control a robot motion using information acquired by a camera. This approach requires to extract visual information from the image to design the control law. The resulting servo loop is built in order to minimize an error expressed in the image space. We consider a direct visual servoing (DVS) from whole images. We propose a new framework to perform VS in the latent space learned by a convolutional autoencoder. We show that this latent space avoids explicit feature extraction and tracking issues and provides a good representation, smoothing the cost function of the VS process. Besides, our experiments show that this unsupervised learning approach allows us to obtain, without labelling cost, an accurate end-positioning, often on par with the best DVS methods in terms of accuracy but with a larger convergence area.