Click2Position: A Vision-Based Interactive System for Underwater Manipulator Guidance

This paper presents an interactive vision-based system that can guide an underwater robotic arm by performing click operations on a calibration board within the camera's field of view. Users can directly select target points on the two-dimensional image interface, and then the system calculates the corresponding three-dimensional coordinates of the target point in the system's base coordinate system through a pre-calibrated conversion process. Different from traditional manual positioning methods, our method does not require operators to explicitly input coordinates or use joysticks for control, thus simplifying the operation burden. Tank experiments have verified the feasibility of the system. Within the short-distance operation range, the average error of single-point repeated positioning for each corner point is between 0.35-0.45 mm with a small standard deviation, and the average error of path repeated positioning is 0.1-0.2 mm, indicating that the system has accurate and stable positioning. The proposed scheme is suitable for common hand-eye robotic arm setups and only requires a calibration board, making it highly practical in scenarios such as underwater maintenance or sampling.