3D Vision-Guided Bore Inspection System

Vision systems are more and more used in the fields of industrial automation and quality control. This paper describes a 3D vision system that guides a robot arm to reliably insert an endoscope into a bore hole for a subsequent bore surface inspection. The already industrial deployed system, developed in the project FibreScope [3], performs a quality control of bores with a diameter ranging from 4 to 50mm and a depth of up to 100mm. This requires a bore detection accuracy of the vision system of "}0.3mm and less than 0.5 in 3D space to modify the robot path for safely inserting the endoscope. The challenge in the design of the vision system was that it must work in process real time achieving the required accuracy. This paper introduces the prototype of the robotic system and the 3D vision system. A performance evaluation of the 3D vision system and its bore localization and detection proofs the need of a vision system to compensate positioning uncertainties for a flexible robotic inspection system.