3-D dual-drive robot control for object recognition

This work describes the development and testing of a 3-D dual-drive surface tracking controller that enables a robot to track along any specified path on the surface of an object. The dual-drive controller computes the normal and tangent vectors relative to movement along the path. The result is controlled movement in 3-D on the surface of an object. This continuous-contact tracking method makes it possible for accurate, dense data sets to be collected in a short period of time. A recognition experiment is performed to show that the data collected from the surface of complex objects can be used for identification.