Robot vision

Citation

(2002), "Robot vision", Industrial Robot, Vol. 29 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.2002.04929fad.010

Robot vision

Robot vision

Applicant: Laser Measurement International Inc. (US)Patent number: US6044183Publication date: 28 March 2000Title: Robot vision using target holes, corners and other object features

A method and apparatus are described which use naturally occurring object features as targets in a machine vision based robot guidance system. The features may be holes, edges, corners, notches, or other features which are definable in more than one dimension. It follows that combinations of features can also be used to determine the orientation of the object. For some objects such as inner panels of car doors, additional features such as triangular holes may be added to assist in the identification process.

In one embodiment of the invention, a high speed processor finds at least three pre- selected feature points on an object. These feature points are compared to those stored in a database for the object and allows a rapid 6-degree of freedom solution for the object location relative to the camera to be calculated. This information can then be translated to the robot or other automation equipment. Although this patent is primarily aimed at industrial robots, the invention is useful for all sorts of machines including vehicles or construction machinery and anywhere a target object has known relative features, stored in a data base.