Optical Coordination Sensor for Precision Cooperating Robots

The need for high precision robotic systems has increased in recent years. Examples include automated assembly of complex electro-mechanical products such as disk drives, cameras, and medical devices. In this paper we present an optical sensor which can sense motion with better than 0.15 m resolution while also o ering the advantages of insusceptibility to ambient lights, high bandwidth, and a large dynamic range. The sensor is used for calibration and coordination tasks in a novel agile robotic system (minifactory) which employs cooperative 2-DOF robots. The sensor can also be used for testing, calibrating, and position sensing in many other high precision robotic applications.