A computer vision and robotic system for an intelligent workstation

Abstract

This paper describes a computer vision and robotics system for an automated workstation. The system can be taught to find an object, recognize it, and direct a robot arm to move to the object, pick it up and place it in user taught bins. The vision system recognizes an object in a frame and extracts the position and orientation information of the object which the robotics system uses to retrieve the object. Direct and inverse kinematic equations are developed for the Mitsubishi Movemaster II RM-501, a small five degree of freedom industrial robot arm. All software is written in “C” and runs under CP/M-68K on a CompuPro MC68008 system. The robotics software is written so as to be independent of the vision system and can be easily used with other computer vision systems or rehosted on other computers. The complete system is designed and implemented in a modular fashion so that a conveyor system may be later added to the workstation.