Heterogeneous Real-Time and Visual Servoing Systems

To evaluate both functional and temporal aspects of our proposed architectures, we rely on a Magnetic Levitating Sphere as a Representative Use Case. Continuous levitation is achieved via Visual Servoing, i.e., optically detecting the sphere’s current position followed by computing the required actuation signal within the order of milliseconds. The Visual Servoing System (consisting of actuator, sensor and heterogeneous Processing Platform) relies on Gigabit Ethernet as a Communication Backbone. With Ethernet now being widely used in industrial automation and many Visual Servoing Applications requiring similar low-latency Image Acquisition and Processing, our Experimental Setup thus serves as a representative use case for such scenarios

Experiments with a nearly-zero latency sensor (i.e., a light barrier) have shown that stable levitation is possible with sampling rates as low as 125 Hz. With Visual Servoing, however, the increased sensing delay (due to image acquisition and processing) requires compensation via higher rates.