Swept volumes and their use in viewpoint computation in robot work-cells

This paper discusses the automatic computation of viewpoints for monitoring objects and features in an active robot work-cell. An important step in the authors´ algorithm for finding viewpoints is the computation of the volumes swept by polyhedral objects moving through space. A method for approximating these volumes for arbitrarily moving polyhedra is presented. Some swept volume results are presented and methods for integrating these results into the authors´ automated machine vision planning (MVP) system are discussed