A method for fine positioning of diagnostic packages in inertial confinement fusion experiments.

A method based on binocular vision servoing for positioning of a diagnostic package in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments is presented. The general diagnostic instrument manipulator will provide precision three dimension positioning and alignment-to-target capability in ICF experiments. In this work, we focus on the final precise automatic positioning with a binocular vision system. A three dimension image projection vector (IPV), which has an almost linear relationship with the target position in 3D space under the condition of weak perspective, is introduced to extract target position information from binocular image. The difference of the IPV between the current image and the desired image will be used as the input of servo controller. A differential motion model was found for the hybrid manipulator with three degrees of freedom. With this model and the said IPV, the servo strategy will be dramatically simplified compare with general image based visual servo in which the image Jacobian matrix needs estimated online. The experiment result implies that the locating accuracy of the manipulator is less than two pixels. This method can also be used in micromanipulation visual servo field.