Computer Vision And Sensor Based Robots

The goal ofthe symposium, "Computer Vision and Sensor-Based Robots," held at the General Motors Research Laboratories on September 2S and 26, 1978, was to stimulate a closer interaction between people working in diverse areas and to discuss fundamental issues related to vision and robotics. This book contains the papers and general discussions of that symposium, the 22nd in an annual series covering different technical disciplines that are timely and of interest to General Motors as well as the technical community at large. The subject of this symposium remains timely because the cost of computer vision hardware continues to drop and there is increasing use of robots in manufacturing applications. Current industrial applications of computer vision range from simple systems that measure or compare to sophisticated systems for part location determination and inspection. Almost all industrial robots today work with known parts in known posi tions, and we are just now beginning to see the emergence of programmable automa tion in which the robot can react to its environment when stimulated by visual and force-touch sensor inputs. As discussed in the symposium, future advances will depend largely on research now underway in several key areas. Development of vision systems that can meet industrial speed and resolution requirements with a sense of depth and color is a necessary step.

This book constitutes the thorougly refereed post-proceedings of an international workshop on sensor based Intelligent Robot held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany in September/October 1998. The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are robot navigation, motion planning, autonomous mobile robots, wheelchair robots, interactive robots, car navigation systems, visual tracking, sensor based navigation, distributed algorithms, computer vision, intelligent agents, robot control, and computational geometry.

Over the past five years robot vision has emerged as a subject area with its own identity. A text based on the proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Vision and Sensor-based Robots held at the General Motors Research Laboratories, Warren, Michigan in 1978, was published by Plenum Press in 1979. This book, edited by George G. Dodd and Lothar Rosso!, probably represented the first identifiable book covering some aspects of robot vision. The subject of robot vision and sensory controls (RoViSeC) occupied an entire international conference held in the Hilton Hotel in Stratford, England in May 1981. This was followed by a second RoViSeC held in Stuttgart, Germany in November 1982. The large attendance at the Stratford conference and the obvious interest in the subject of robot vision at international robot meetings, provides the stimulus for this current collection of papers. Users and researchers entering the field of robot vision for the first time will encounter a bewildering array of publications on all aspects of computer vision of which robot vision forms a part. It is the grey area dividing the different aspects of computer vision which is not easy to identify. Even those involved in research sometimes find difficulty in separating the essential differences between vision for automated inspection and vision for robot applications. Both of these are to some extent applications of pattern recognition with the underlying philosophy of each defining the techniques used.

Most industrial robots today have little or no sensory capability. Feedback is limited to information about joint positions, combined with a few interlock and timing signals. These robots can function only in an environment where the objects to be manipulated are precisely located in the proper position for the robot to grasp (i. e. , in a structured environment). For many present industrial applications, this level of performance has been adequate. With the increasing demand for high performance sensor-based robot manipulators in assembly tasks, meeting this demand and challenge can only be achieved through the consideration of: 1) efficient acquisition and processing of intemaVextemal sensory information, 2) utilization and integration of sensory information from various sensors (tactile, force, and vision) to acquire knowledge in a changing environment, 3) exploitation of inherent robotic parallel algorithms and efficient VLSI architectures for robotic computations, and finally 4) system integration into a working and functioning robotic system. This is the intent of the Workshop on Sensor-Based Robots: Algorithms and Architectures - to study the fundamental research issues and problems associated with sensor-based robot manipulators and to propose approaches and solutions from various viewpoints in improving present day robot manipula tors in the areas of sensor fusion and integration, sensory information processing, and parallel algorithms and architectures for robotic computations.

Robotic systems consist of object or scene recognition, vision-based motion control, vision-based mapping, and dense range sensing, and are used for identification and navigation. As these computer vision and robotic connections continue to develop, the benefits of vision technology including savings, improved quality, reliability, safety, and productivity are revealed. Robotic Vision: Technologies for Machine Learning and Vision Applications is a comprehensive collection which highlights a solid framework for understanding existing work and planning future research. This book includes current research on the fields of robotics, machine vision, image processing and pattern recognition that is important to applying machine vision methods in the real world.

The goal ofthe symposium, "Computer Vision and Sensor-Based Robots," held at the General Motors Research Laboratories on September 2S and 26, 1978, was to stimulate a closer interaction between people working in diverse areas and to discuss fundamental issues related to vision and robotics. This book contains the papers and general discussions of that symposium, the 22nd in an annual series covering different technical disciplines that are timely and of interest to General Motors as well as the technical community at large. The subject of this symposium remains timely because the cost of computer vision hardware continues to drop and there is increasing use of robots in manufacturing applications. Current industrial applications of computer vision range from simple systems that measure or compare to sophisticated systems for part location determination and inspection. Almost all industrial robots today work with known parts in known posi tions, and we are just now beginning to see the emergence of programmable automa tion in which the robot can react to its environment when stimulated by visual and force-touch sensor inputs. As discussed in the symposium, future advances will depend largely on research now underway in several key areas. Development of vision systems that can meet industrial speed and resolution requirements with a sense of depth and color is a necessary step.

This edited and reviewed volume consists of papers that were originally presented at a workshop in the Scientific Center at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. It gives an overview of the field and presents the latest developments in the areas of modeling and planning for sensor based robots. The particular topics addressed include active vision, sensor fusion, environment modeling, motion planning, robot navigation, distributed control architectures, reactive behavior, and others.

This volume contains a series of papers originally presented at a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) entitled Kinematic and Dynamic Issues in Sensor Based Control. The workshop, one of a series concerned with topics in sensory robotics, took place at II Ciocco, Castelvecchio di Pascoli, Italy in October 1987. Attendance was by invitation only and the majority of participants are recognised leaders in their field- some from the robotics community, others with a more general control background. The main topics of interest were grouped into eight sessions represented by the eight main sections of the book: 1: Modelling Techniques: General Kinematic and Dynamic Issues 2: Sensor Signal Processing 3: Force Control 4: Further Control Topics 5: Vision Based Control 6: Further Kinematic and Dynamic Issues 7: Computational Issues 8: Learning from Sensor Input Also included are brief reports of the roundtable discussions which sought to determine important future directions of research in this area. My thanks to all those who made the workshop possible: The NATO Scientific Affairs Division and the panel on Sensory Systems for Robotic Control who provided most of the financial support; the workshop committee, Dr. B. Espiau, Dr. P. Coiffet, Dr. P.