Fast calibrated stereo vision for manipulation

To make sensors in general, and vision in particular, work for robotic systems we must find ways to extract timely, relevant, accurate information. Building such sensors will require employing any special devices, constraints or calibration that can help us meet these goals. This paper describes in detail issues in developing a calibrated stereo vision system for robotic part manipulation. A robot arm is used to generate calibration data. A highspeed pipeline processor generates correspondences at 4 Hz, using an image warping device to rectify the right image according to the epipolar transformation at frame rates. A highly simplified localization system determines part position to within acceptable tolerances for the robot manipulator within 5-7 seconds. The result is a complete vision/manipulation system for part manipulation