An Industrial Robot as Part of an Automatic System for Geometric Reverse Engineering

Abstract

The industrial robot equipped with a laser profile scanner is a desirable alternative in applications where high speed, robustness and flexibility combined with low cost is important. The accuracy of the industrial robot is relatively low, but if the GRE system has access to camera data or profiles, basic GRE operations like the fitting of lines can be achieved with relatively high accuracy. This can be used to measure for example distance or radius within a single camera picture. Experiments that show this are published in (Rahayem et al., 2007); (Rahayem et al., 2008). The author also investigated the problem of planar segmentation and implemented a traditional segmentation algorithm section 4.2 based on 3D point clouds. From the investigations described above it is possible to conclude that the relatively low accuracy of an industrial robot to some extents can be compensated if the GRE software has access to data directly from the scanner. This is normally not the situation for current commercial solutions but is easy to realize if the GRE software is integrated with the measuring hardware, as in our laboratory system. It is natural to continue the work with segmentation of conic surfaces. Cones, cylinders, and spheres are common shapes in manufacturing. It is