Laser steering using virtual trifocal visual servoing

This paper focuses on the development of a weakly calibrated three-view-based visual servoing control law applied to the laser steering process. It proposes to revisit the conventional trifocal constraints governing a three-view geometry for a more suitable use in the design of an efficient trifocal vision-based control. Thereby, an explicit control law is derived, without any matrix inversion, which allows to simply prove the global exponential stability of the control. Moreover, only ‘[Formula: see text]’ are necessary to design a fast trifocal control system. Thanks to the simplicity of the implementation, our control law is fast, accurate, robust to errors on the weak calibration and it exhibits good behavior in terms of convergence and decoupling. This was demonstrated by different experimental validations performed on a test-bench for the steering of laser spot on a 2D and 3D surface using a two degrees-of-freedom commercial piezoelectric mirror, as well as in preliminary cadaver trials using an endoluminal micromirror prototype.