Measuring and processing arbitrary oriented object by robots

In some applications, robots are needed to perform specific tasks on an arbitrary oriented object, such as, grinding, polishing and curve drawing, etc. Thus, the location, surface boundary and surface equation of the object need to be known in advance so as to generate force/position trajectories for the required tasks on the object. In this paper, an approach for modelling an arbitrary oriented object surface is proposed. The approach is based on the robot sensing changes in its environment by use of a force sensor on its end effector. When an object is encountered in the workspace, the force/position control and force feedback enable the robot to track along the object´s surface and collect position information to be used for object surface modelling. Experimental results are presented