A spatial position tracker for work-site teaching of sensor-enhanced robotic systems

A spatial position tracker (SPT) for the human operator that performs robotic teaching at a work-site coexisting with a sensor-enhanced robot system is presented. The SPT measures the operator´s position in real time by stereo processing of images from two CCD cameras with infrared filters and the operator´s orientation, using a three-dimensional gyro. It enables the work-site operator to utilize augmented reality to understand the necessary task world information, including the sensor and end-effector´s relative position and orientation without any special skills. In this paper, we describe the system configuration, discuss the detection accuracy, and present results for applying it to a multimodal teaching advisor currently being developed