Planning and control in reconfigurable manufacturing workcell

Summary form only given. We show how a robot manipulator is able to manipulate a part in a reconfigurable workcell which consists of a moving disc conveyor, a single CCD camera and a robot manipulator. The important assumption used is that the position and orientation of the camera and the base frame of the robot is a priori assumed to be unknown, which is a common case in reconfigurable workcell and is ´visually calibrated´ during the operation of the manipulator. Moreover, the part placed on the conveyor is assumed to be non-planar. The novelties of the proposed approach in this paper includes: 1) a multi-sensor fusion scheme based on complementary data for the purpose of part localization; and 2) self-calibration between the turntable and the robot manipulator using visual data and feature points on the end-effector. The principle advantages of the proposed scheme are: it renders a possibility to reconfigure a manufacturing workcell without re-calibrating the relation between the turntable and the robot, and it greatly lowers the requirement on the image processing speed.