Handling Uncertainty due to the Delay Between Complex Sensing and Manipulation in an Industrial Workcell

Allowing dynamic motions for payloads within a workcell is a fundamentally novel idea for practical industrial robots. The ability to handle payloads moving in semi-structured ways would significantly increase the potential markets for industrial robotics. However, due to the inherent time delay between complex sensing and manipulation, the manipulation fails in some circumstances. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a generic method to model the dynamic intercept and manipulation capability of vision based industrial robot systems. In order to verify the method, we present experiments using our industrial workcell prototype to dynamically intercept and manipulate semi-randomly moving objects. We conduct experiments over 1000 runs with two different kinds of dynamic tasks, "scoop" and "trap." The experimental results validate our theory