Interactive visual specification of robot position

The authors describe the use of stereo pairs of images to specify robot motion. The experimental setup includes a SUN workstation, a PUMA 560 robot, and an Imaging 151 vision system. An X-window environment displays stereo images of the work scene. Image processing is performed to extract linear edge segments from the images and the results are displayed on screen. Using a pointing device, the user selects a group of edges from the object relevant to the task. The 3-D structure of this group of features is found by stereo triangulation, and they can be displayed in 3-D from any point of view. A viewpoint orthogonal to the plane defined by these 3-D edges is used to specify the robot position relative to object position. The actual robot will then be moved to the specified position. A set of interactive vision functions is developed to aid the interactive stereo triangulation