From solid model to robot vision

At the National Bureau of Standards, a method is being developed for transferring sufficient information directly from the solid modeling system to the robot vision system to enable the robot to recognize a part. The information is encoded in the form of a graph, called an aspect graph, together with functions associated to each vertex of the graph. Aspect graphs were developed by J.J. Koenderink of the State University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, as part of an attempt to understand how shape information is represented by the human vision system. Currently the method is being developed for parts designed on the PADL2 system. In particular, it does not yet handle contoured surfaces. Extensions to deal with contoured surfaces appear to be feasible and will be mentioned briefly.