Towards visually servoed manipulation of car engine parts

The disassembly of engines of used cars based on visually servoed manipulators requires a state-of-the-art vision system which is able to evaluate images of dirty, partly occluded or possibly rearranged quasi- or non-polyhedral parts in real-time. As the pose of a stationary rigid part has, in general, six degrees of freedom, at least six degrees of freedom of a manipulator have to be visually controlled. Two pose estimators relying on different types of image features are discussed within a common framework. A position-based solution to the visually servoed manipulation of non-polyhedrals is presented that extends to real time and meets all given requirements. Experiments with the manipulation of a battery, which is partly occluded by wires, show the feasibility of the proposed approach