Tài liệu Workshop on European Scientific and Industrial Collaboration on Promoting Advanced docx

WESIC’98 Workshop on European Scientific and Industrial Collaboration on Promoting

Advanced Technologies in Manufacturing. Girona, June 1998.

Vision-guided Intelligent Robots

for Automating Manufacturing, Materials Handling

and Services

Rainer Bischoff and Volker Graefe

Bundeswehr University Munich

Institute of Measurement Science

Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39, 85577 Neubiberg, Germany

Tel.: +49-89-6004-3589, Fax: +49-89-6004-3074

E-Mail: {Rainer.Bischoff | Graefe}@unibw-muenchen.de

Abstract

"Seeing" machines and "intelligent" robots have been the focus of research conducted by the

Institute of Measurement Science since 1977. Our goal is to gain a basic understanding of vision,

autonomy and intelligence of technical systems, and to construct seeing intelligent robots. These

should be able to operate robustly and at an acceptable speed in the real world, to survive in a

dynamically changing natural environment, and to perform autonomously a wide variety of tasks.

In this paper we report on three autonomous robots that have been developed during recent

research projects for automating manufacturing, materials handling, and services. In the order of

commissioning we have set up an autonomous vehicle, a stationary manipulator and a humanoid

robot with omnidirectional motion capability, a sensor head and two arms. We use standard video

cameras on all robots as the main sensing modality. We focused our research on navigation in

known and unknown environments, machine learning, and manipulator control without any

knowledge of quantitative models.

1 Introduction

As a result of the increasing demands of automating manufacturing processes and services with

greater flexibility, intelligent robots with the ability to adapt to knew environments and various

circumstances are key factors for success. To develop such robots manifold competencies are

required in disciplines such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science

and mathematics.

Our expertise is to build modular robotic systems with various kinematic chains that use vision

sensors to perceive their environment and to perform user-defined tasks efficiently. To put the

robots into operation no or only minor modification of the infrastructure is necessary because our

approach uses vision as the main sensing modality and does not depend on any priori knowledge

of quantitative models. We have developed powerful image processing hardware, as well as

software and control algorithms, to enable robots to operate autonomously (section 2). Our AGV

ATHENE II is able to navigate in partly structured environments, e.g., in factories and office

buildings, making it suitable for all kinds of transportation tasks that are required to automate

manufacturing and services (section 3). Our stationary articulated manipulator is equipped with

an uncalibrated stereo-vision system being able to handle diverse objects without calculating its

inverse kinematics (section 4). In our current research project we have developed a prototype of