High precision visual servoing control of robotic manufacturing systems

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To reduce labor cost and increase throughput in the manufacturing industry, there is an increasing demand for automatic robotic manufacturing systems such as robotic assembly for piping and parts alignment, bin picking systems, and fastening systems for drilling and welding, which require high precision and fast robot positioning. These demanding requirements pose challenges for the robots to handle the large-scale workpiece with high payload in an un-structural environment. The integration of the machine vision system into robots can address the challenge and is a key step towards the successful implementation of robotized manufacturing systems. The vision system mimics the human sense of vision and allows for non-contact measurement of the environment. When it is used as robotic sensors, the vision system can compensate for the robotic positioning errors and such vision-based robotic system is known to be effective in providing precision and flexibility of manufacturing. However, due to changing illumination in industrial environments, variations in objects and the inherent nonlinear dynamics of the robots, it is very difficult to guarantee the positioning precision of the robotic manufacturing systems. Although a lot of academic research and industrial development have been devoted to visual servoing, cost efficient solutions to high precision and fast positioning of large-scale workpiece in an unknown environment are still sought by both academia and manufacturing industries. The objective of this proposal is to establish reliable and practical integration solutions that will enable robotic manufacturing systems to achieve high position accuracy in an industrial environment. Such systems are robust to the uncertainties such as changing illumination and calibration error and can deal with the nonlinearities of robots. The ultimate goal is to develop cost effective visual servoing systems to render the current robotic manufacturing systems high end ones with the sense of vision.