Vision-based Handling with a Mobile Robot

Mobile systems become more and more important in the area of modern manufacturing. In order to handle an object with a manipulator mounted on an autonomous mobile system (AMS) within a changing environment, the object has to be identiied and its 3D pose relative to the manipulator has to be determined with suucient accuracy, because in general its exact position is not known a priori. The object recognition unit of the presented system accomplishes this 3D pose estimation task using a single CCD camera mounted in the gripper exchange system of a mobile robot. The reliability of the results is checked by an independent fault-detection unit. A recovery unit handles most of the possible faults autonomously increasing the availability of the system.