There are many real factory problems that can be solved by the use of robots equipped with computer vision. Typical of these tasks are the unpacking and assembly of loosely constrained objects. This paper describes a system in which TV deflection units are unpacked from a large carton and mounted onto the necks of picture tubes. The unpacking is performed by a cartesian gantry robot carrying a TV camera equipped with parallel-projection optics. The asso-ciated vision system is used to determine the position of the deflection units in the carton. Once a deflection unit has been unpacked, it is picked up by a PUMA 560 robot and then mounted in a specific orientation onto a picture tube. The mounting system is equipped with three TV cameras to locate the deflection unit and the neck of the tube. The paper describes the structure and operation of both systems, including gray-level picture processing, camera calibration with-out operator intervention, and the use of a general purpose, robot operating system, ROBOS, to control the two tasks.

Date Published: 1 October 1984
PDF: 6 pages
Opt. Eng. 23(5) 235512 doi: 10.1117/12.7973330
Published in: Optical Engineering Volume 23, Issue 5