Improving visually servoed disassembly operations by automatic camera placement

It is advantageous to use an independently mobile camera in visually servoed disassembly operations since its degrees of freedom can be used to bring the camera into an optimal view-pose. Apart from the vision-based closed-loop control that guides the disassembly robot, a second vision-based closed-loop control can be set up which upgrades the camera from a passive to an active sensor and optimizes the view-pose according to changes in the scene domain. The objective of this contribution is to present an approach to model-based pose initialization and pose refinement steps of an active camera which is able to simultaneously observe and track several objects moving to some extent independently from each other. In both steps, constraints regarding object occlusions, the limited field-of-view, and the uncertainty of pose estimation are exploited to determine an optimal camera pose. The feasibility of this approach to model-based pose initialization is experimentally validated and documented for the case of the manipulation of a shock absorber lid