Calibration free visually controlled manipulation of parts in a robotic manufacturing workcell

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new approach to visually manipulate, with the aid of a robot manipulator, a part placed randomly on a rotating turntable. The highlight of our approach is that the camera and the robot end effector are both assumed to be uncalibrated. We only assume that the height of the robot end effector is known. Our approach utilizes virtual rotation of the camera via image processing not previously introduced in the literature. Finally, the tracking scheme is implemented by planning the error and gradually forcing it to zero while maintaining the torque controls within acceptable limits. This way we demonstrate a new visually guided analytical tracking scheme.