Estimation of contact shape of quadric environment with object probing operation

Abstract

There are geometric and positional uncertainties in some operations such like assem- bly operations. In order to perform an assembly operation by robot successfully, it is required to es- timate the correct geometric and position informa- tion of a fixed environment. This paper describes a technique that can estimate the contact geometric and position information between a quadric object and a quadric environment from a number of posi- tions and orientations of a moving object, which are measured while the object is dexterously slid and rotated on the environment around the contact po- sition. There are six kinds of basic contact forms when the two quadric bodies are in contact with each other. Corresponding to four of these basic contact forms, four kinds of estimation approaches are proposed. By these estimation approaches, the environment geometric and position information on contacting parts can be estimated successfully. Ex- perimental verification on the proposed approaches is performed and its results are outlined. © 2005 IEEE.