Estimation of contact shape of quadric environment with object probing operation

There are geometric and positional uncertainties in some operations such as assembly operations. In order to perform an assembly operation by robot successfully, it is required to estimate the correct geometric and position information of a fixed environment. This paper describes a technique that can estimate the contact geometric and position information between a quadric object and a quadric environment from a number of positions and orientations of a moving object, which are measured while the object is dexterously slid and rotated on the environment around the contact position. There are six kinds of basic contact forms when the two quadric bodies are in contact with each other. Corresponding to four of these basic contact forms, four kinds of estimation approaches are proposed. By these estimation approaches, the environment geometric and position information on contacting parts can be estimated successfully. Experimental verification on the proposed approaches is performed and its results are outlined.