Spatial Control of High Speed Robot Arms using a Tilted Camera

Abstract

The paper demonstrates that when mounted on a robot endeffector a camera can be used to control the robot arm to move at high speed along a given work-piece. We use a predictive architecture that considers both the robot’s dynamics and the workpiece’s uncer-tainties of the pose or shape. To comply with applica-tions such as glue spraying or laser cutting, the camera is mounted laterally with respect to the tool and, for reasons of visibility, tilted. This complicates the con-trol equations. Nevertheless we manage to compute them in real time and to follow a non planar tube at a speed of 0.7 m/s. In spite of a cost effective hardware setup the mean path deviations are less than 1 mm. 1