Development of a dual-stage and visual-servo filming robot

Abstract

This article presents the development of a visual-servo filming robot for dolly & truck style camera movement in filming applications. The robot was implemented with a fast-response slider as the upper stage on top of the slow-response tracked robot body as the lower stage, to improve target tracking performance. A new switching controller was developed, which controlled the stages’ motions by balancing and adjusting the weights of vision error and slider’s noncentering error of the upper stage, thus achieving tracking performance better than the traditional master–slave control strategy. The simulations were carried out to evaluate the tracking performance of the model, particularly focusing on evaluating how the dual stage improves the overall response of the model. The similar evaluation was executed experimentally as well. Both results confirm that the fast-response characteristics of the upper stage can compensate the slow dynamics of lower stage, the tracked robot which is inevitably heavy due to its composition.