<title>Pick-and-place guidance utilizing an integrated control method and structured light ranging</title>

Abstract

This paper presents a vision-guided control system for an industrial robot capable of picking up an object, moving it to a goal, and placing it there. Tasks given to the control system are based on imperfect knowledge about the environment. The control system corrects the task parameters by matching them against range information gained from the environment. The control system is part of a larger system, which includes a high-level goal-oriented planner. The planner consists of hierarchically organized planning-executing-monitoring triplets, which execute given tasks by dividing them into subtasks, by sending the subtasks either to other triplets or to the control system described in this paper, and by monitoring the execution of the subtasks. The planner sees the robot and the control system as an intelligent robot capable of executing pick-and-place tasks in a dynamic, partly unknown environment. This paper presents the results of the testing of the control system with an industrial 6-axis robot and a structured light-based range sensor. Also the principle of calibrating the robot and the sensor is presented.