<title>Intelligent robotics research at Waterloo</title>

Abstract

Abstract The paper presents the recent inteffigent robotics research being carried out at the PAMI Lab of theUniversity of Waterloo. The inteffigence control of manipulators is directed and guided by 3-D vision. Itis implemented for a mobile robot and robot manipulators in a workcell. The intelligent robotic system iscapable of: a) real-time recognition and location of 3-D objects and obstacles with a single camera systemmounted on the robot arm; b) optimal trajectory pbmning for a robotic rrumipulator with obstacle andsingularity avoidance capability and c) vision directed navigation of a mobile robot. Application of thistechnology to industrial and space station projects wifi be included in the discussion. 1 Introduction An ongoing project at Waterloo aims at developing intelligent robotics to support the new gener-ation of autonomous robots and flexible manufacturing systems. The tasks accomplished include:1) visual recognition of task environment; 2) task planning and coordination of robots for simpleassembly tasks; 3) object avoidance trajectory planning for robot manipulators and 4) mobilerobot navigation and control. Specific focuses of the research is on developing: 1) an intelligentrobotics system that meet the key technological requirements (in vision and trajectory planning)of the space autonomous robotics sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency and 2) vision basedrobotics for flexible manufacturing. In this paper, we will report only: a) 3-D robot vision systemfor object model synthesis and scene interpretation; b) optimal trajectory planning and c) visionguided navigation of a mobile robot.