handeye

Handeye is a term used to describe the coordination between visual perception and hand movements, and in technical contexts, the integration of a camera with a robotic manipulator. In humans, hand-eye coordination enables tasks that require precise alignment between what is seen and how the hand is moved, such as reaching for, grasping, and manipulating objects.

In human development, hand-eye coordination emerges in infancy and improves with practice and experience. Neural processes involve interactions between the visual and motor systems, including the dorsal visual stream, parietal cortex, cerebellum, and motor pathways. Performance is often assessed with tasks that require tracing, object manipulation, or pegboard activities, reflecting the efficiency of sensorimotor integration.

In robotics and computer vision, handeye systems connect a camera (eye) to a robotic arm or gripper (hand). A central challenge is hand-eye calibration, which determines the rigid transformation between the camera frame and the robot frame. This problem is commonly formulated as AX = XB, and approaches vary for eye-in-hand configurations (camera mounted on the end-effector) and eye-to-hand configurations (camera fixed in the workspace). Visual servoing methods, including image-based visual servoing (IBVS) and position-based visual servoing (PBVS), use image data or pose estimates to drive motion.

Applications span industrial automation, robot-assisted surgery, and manipulation tasks such as precise pick-and-place and assembly. Challenges include system latency, calibration accuracy, and robustness to lighting changes, occlusions, and dynamic scenes. The concept remains central to both theoretical studies of sensorimotor integration and practical implementations of autonomous manipulation systems.