This paper presents a novel approach to control a humanoid head for object tracking. The proposed approach is based on the concept of virtual mechanism, where the real head is enhanced with a virtual link that connects the eye with a point in 3-D space. We tested our implementation on a humanoid head with seven degrees of freedom and two rigidly connected cameras in each eye (wide-angle and telescopic). The experimental results show that the proposed control algorithm can be used to maintain the view of an observed object in the foveal (telescopic) image using information from the peripheral view. Unlike other methods proposed in the literature, our approach shows how to exploit the redundancy of the robot head. The proposed technique is systematic and can be easily implemented on different types of active humanoid heads. The results show good tracking performance regardless of the distance between the object and the head. Moreover, the uncertainties in the kinematic model of the head do not affect the performance of the system.
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