An application of vision systems to the path planning of industrial robots

Abstract

In this paper the early results on the possibility to use a video system for the robot's trajectories planning is presented. By means of this application it is possible to plan the trajectories by a PC monitor, just clicking with the mouse on the monitor. In order to obtain a three dimensional vision a couple of cameras has been used. A software was developed that by means of each couple of frames make possible to select a desired point in the work space, obtaining three cartesian coordinates. These last are given to the control system and recorded by this last. Finally the control system will move the robot in a work cycle that is described by means of the points selected and recorded as described above. Tests have been carried on with a robot prototype that was designed and built at our Laboratory and showed a very good behaviour of the system. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.