Vision-guided Intelligent Robots for Automating Manufacturing, Materials Handling and Services

Abstract

Seeing machines and robots have been the focus of research conducted by the Institute of Measurement Science since 1977. Our goal is to gain a basic understanding of vision, autonomy and intelligence of technical systems, and to construct seeing intelligent robots. These should be able to operate robustly and at an acceptable speed in the real world, to survive in a dynamically changing natural environment, and to perform autonomously a wide variety of tasks. In this paper we report on three autonomous robots that have been developed during recent research projects for automating manufacturing, materials handling, and services. In the order of commissioning we have set up an autonomous vehicle, a stationary manipulator and a humanoid robot with omnidirectional motion capability, a sensor head and two arms. We use standard video cameras on all robots as the main sensing modality. We focused our research on navigation in known and unknown environments, machine learning, and manipulator control without any knowledge of quantitative models.