Monocular vision-based visual control for SCARA-type robotic arms: a depth mapping approach

Abstract

The accelerated growth of an increasingly automated industry requires the use of autonomous robotic systems. However, the use of these systems commonly requires an enormous amount of sensors. In this paper we evaluate the performance of a new system for visual control of a selective compliance assembly robot arm (SCARA) robotic arm using a monocular depth map that only requires one monocular camera. This system aims to be an efficient alternative to reduce the number of sensors in the robotic arm area while maintaining the effectiveness of traditional vision algorithms that use stereoscopic architectures of cameras. For this purpose, this system is compared with representative state-of the-art vision algorithms focused on the control of robotic arms. The results are statistically analyzed, indicating that the algorithm proposed in this research has competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art robotic arm visual control algorithms only using a single monocular camera.