Adaptive dynamic programming-based feature tracking control of visual servoing manipulators with unknown dynamics

This paper investigates a feature tracking control method for visual servoing (VS) manipulators adaptive dynamic programming (ADP)-based the unknown dynamics. The major superiority of ADP-based optimal control lies in that the visual tracking problem is converted to the feature tracking error control with optimal cost function. Moreover, an adaptive neural network observer is developed to approximate the entire uncertainties, which are utilized to construct an improved cost function. By establishing a critic neural network, the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation is solved, and the approximate optimal error control policy is derived. The closed-loop VS manipulator system is verified to be ultimately uniformly bounded with the developed ADP-based feature tracking control strategy according to the Lyapunov theory. Finally, simulation results under various situations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher tracking accuracy than other methods, as well as satisfies energy optimal requirements.