A Time-Delay Control Approach for a Stereo Vision Based Human-Machine Interaction System

In this paper, an approach to control a 6-DoF stereo camera for the purpose of actively tracking the face of a human observer in the context of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is proposed. The main objective in the presented work is to cope with the critical time-delay introduced by the computer vision algorithms used to acquire the feedback variable within the control system. In the studied HRI architecture, the feedback variable is represented by the 3D position of a human subject. We proposed a predictive control method which is able to handle the high time-delay inserted by the vision elements into the control system of the stereo camera. Also, along with the predictive control approach, a novel 3D nose detection algorithm is suggested for the computation of the feedback variable. The performance of the implemented platform is given through experimental results.