Multisensor integration for sensor guided robots

Most industrial robot plants possess only insufficient opportunities of integrating external sensor data into robot controls. For that reason robot plants react extremely inflexibly to varying geometrical relations between workpiece and tool. This effect occurs in both machining technologies and assembly. To obtain detailed sensor information, highly sophisticated single sensor systems may occasionally be used. However, these problems can be solved in most cases by a fast and cheap multisensor extension. The expenditure for configuration and set-up of sensor systems as well as multisensor systems should be as low as possible, because it represents an essential cost factor in production. On the foundation of an existing system for sensor data integration into robot controls, a concept for flexible multisensor fusion and integration is designed and implemented. By means of three applications of different complexity the efficiency of the software system is indicated. The system consists of a hierarchic structure with three levels and can be divided into the two main modules: control and sensing. By configuration of the topology, the methods and the parameters of these main modules the user can easily adapt the system for different applications in production. Thus the expenditure for installation, setting up and conversion of the multisensor system is reduced to a minimum