A Simplified Teaching Method of a Playback-Type Industrial Robot

The present study is devoted to the development of a simplified teaching method whereby the control data of the 3-dimensional operations of a playback-type industrial robot can be stored in a personal computer. The control data of the 3-dimensional operations are given using an instruction wand handled by an operator. The operator\u27s task is only to track a desired robot path with the wand. The 3-dimensional position of the wand are measured by ultrasonic devices, the principle of which was developed for this study and is introduced in detail. In order to clarify the applicability of this method, experiments were performed with respect to a continuous-path teaching and a pick-and-place task teaching which are typical jobs of robot operators

3-D Measurement of a Human Body

This paper describes a system which enables a fast 3-dimensional profile measurement of a human body using a slit-ray projection method. One distinctive feature of this system is that a real-time video processor is employed in order to reduce the amount of image data to be processed without eliminating essential information and enable a fast measurement of the human body. Experimental results show that a calibrating method presented for the TV cameras and the slit-ray projector is convenient and enables sufficient accurate measurements

Three-dimensional Quantitative Visualization from a Single Image

By setting a refractor at an angle to the optical axis of a closed circuit display (CCD) camera lens, the image of a measurement point recorded on the image plane is displaced by an amount that corresponds to the distance between the camera and the measurement point. When the refractor is rotated at high speed while the camera is operating, the image of the measurement point appears as an annular streak. Since the radius of the annular streak is inversely proportional to the distance between the camera and measurement point, the three-dimensional (3-D) position of the measurement point can be obtained by extracting data from the streak. In this paper, this system is applied to measure a moving surface. To do this, multiple laser spots are projected onto the surface. The position of each laser spot reflected from the surface is measured using a circular dynamic stereo system. Moreover, this system is applied to flow measurement as a potential application and the results are described