Determining the location of components in an AMP environment

The manipulation of components by a robot in an automatic manufacturing process (AMP) requires knowledge about each component´s location and orientation. A 3-D representation of the robot´s workspace is thus required. In the work presented the 3-D representation is built up using information obtained from robot mountable CCD cameras positioned around the workspace. Each camera is connected to a transputer which is responsible for preprocessing the extracted data before its subsequent use. The process of extracting the information from the cameras is separated from the processes that use this information. This separation of information provider from information user enables the software that controls the cameras (and even the cameras themselves) to be upgraded with no corresponding changes to the information user software. The paper outlines the procedure whereby the model of the workspace is constructed and subsequently used to locate the components within it