A dense and direct approach to visual servoing using depth maps

Overview & Synopsis

This paper presents a novel 3D servoing approach using dense depth maps to perform robotic tasks. With respect to position- based approaches, our method does not require the estimation of the 3D pose (direct), nor the extraction and matching of 3D features (dense) and only requires dense depth maps provided by 3D sensors. Our approach has been validated in various servoing experiments using the depth information from a low cost RGB-D sensor. Positioning tasks are properly achieved despite noisy measurements, even when partial occlusions or scene modifications occur. We also show that, in cases where a reference depth map cannot be easily available, synthetic ones generated with a rendering engine still lead to satisfactory positioning performances. Application of the approach to the navigation of a mobile robot is also demonstrated.