The location of components in an automatic manufacturing process

The manipulation of objects by a robot within its workspace requires knowledge about each object´s location and orientation. A 3D representation of the robot´s workspace is thus required. This 3D representation would be built up from information obtained from various sensors within the workspace. In the paper the sensors used are robot mountable CCD Cameras. In the transputer based system developed, 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. Additional cameras can easily be added to the system while obsolete cameras and those with poor imaging characteristics can simply be removed