Sensor planning with kinematics constraint for dimensional inspection of sheet metal parts

Sensor planning is critical in many inspection systems. In typical part dimensional inspection systems, eye-in-hand robots are usually adopted. One practical problem that needs to be addressed is that the viewpoints, or correspondingly, the robot hand-tip positions and orientations, should be within the robot\´s reachability space. Furthermore, it is desirable that the robot can reach these viewpoints "comfortably". In this sense the robot kinematics constraint should be considered in sensor planning. In the paper, an approach is developed to integrate the kinematics constraint into sensor planning. This approach models the problem as an integer programming problem. With this approach, the computation burden of the robot placement problem can be avoided. Experiment and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach