Teaching a robot to operate a lift

This paper discusses a vision problem for the detection of lift operation panel which is a plane subject to deformation due to viewing angle change. The key problem in this project is the large scale change where the panel detection has to start at a significant distance away, and end up with the camera very near to the panel button. The process has three steps: (1) hunting for the panel using a coarse searching algorithm; (2) guiding the robot arm towards the panel; at close range, a model based matching algorithm is applied to verify (or identify) the panel; (3) after verification, tracking the button to guide the robot towards it. Two algorithms were used and it is shown that the weak perspective model outperforms the affine model.