Teaching a Robot to See How it Moves

The positioning of a robot hand in order to grasp an object is a problem fundamental to robotics. The task we want to perform can be described as follows: given a visual scene the robot arm must reach an indicated point in that visual scene. This marked point indicates the observed object that has to be grasped. In order to accomplish this task, a mapping from the visual scene to the corresponding robot joint values must be available. The task set out in this chapter is to design a self-learning controller that constructs that mapping without knowledge of the geometry of the camera-robot system.