Computing Camera Viewpoints in an Active Robot Work Cell

This paper presents a dynamic sensor planning system, capable of planning the locations and settings of vision sensors for use in an environment containing objects moving in known ways. The key component of this research is the computation of the camera position, orientation, and optical settings to be used over a time interval. A new algorithm is presented for viewpoint computation which ensures that the feature detectability constraints of focus, resolution, field-of-view, and visibility are satisfied. A five degree-of-freedom Cartesian robot carrying a CCD camera in a hand/eye configuration and surrounding the work-cell of a Puma 560 robot was constructed for performing sensor planning experiments. The results of these experiments, demonstrating the use of this system in a robot work-cell, are presented. The research described in this paper was performed while this author was at the Columbia University Department of Computer Science. yThis work was supported in part by DARPA contract DACA-76-92-C-0007, an ONR MURI Grant, NSF grants CDA-90-24735 and IRI-93-11877, and Toshiba Corporation