Develop feedback robot planning method for 3D surface inspection

The non-contact 3D sensing technology, though achieved many success in a variety of applications, needs an automation system to expand its applications to automotive industries for 3D shape inspection. The reason is the difficulty for an operator to find an optimal solution by the manual control of sensor viewpoints. The problem of this industrial application is the capability for the sensing system to simultaneously satisfy all requirements of competence, efficiency, and cost. A robot-aided 3D sensing system can provide such a solution. A CAD-guided robot view planner can automatically generate viewpoints. Measurement accuracy can be satisfied in a certain range. However, the unpredictable image noises still need to be compensated for better measurement performance. In this paper, a feedback planning system is designed and applied to the CAD-guided robot sensor planning system. The feedback controller can automatically evaluate the accuracy of obtained point clouds and generate new viewpoints. This feedback-based inspection system had been successfully implemented in filling holes of a point cloud, caused by shadows and light reflections. Such a system had been implemented on an ABB industrial robot for a 3D measurement of an automotive glass and a pillar. This paper introduces the developed planning system and our current results.