Automatic inspection of analog and digital meters in a robot vision system

A critical limitation of most of the robots utilized in industrial environments arises due to their inability to utilize sensory feedback. This forces robot operation into totally preprogrammed or teleoperation modes. In order to endow the new generation of robots with higher levels of autonomy techniques for sensing of their work environments and for accurate and efficient analysis of the sensory data must be developed. In this paper detailed development of vision system modules for inspecting various types of meters, both analog and digital, encountered in a robotic inspection and manipulation tasks are described. These modules are tested using industrial robots having multisensory input capability

Real-Time Visual Tracking Using Correlation Techniques

A real-time correspondence based tracking algorithm is detailed. The system uses a pipeline processor, a general purpose processor, a camera and a display. The Minimum Noise and Correlation Energy (MINACE) filter is used in the tracking algorithm as it provides a good combination of speed, accuracy and flexibility for the targeted hardware system. The system designed is fast and tracking is accomplished at a rate of 15hz. The system is adaptive and does not rely on a previous model of the object; the training image for filter synthesis is acquired from previous image frames and the filter is synthesized online to accomodate 3-D variations of the target being tracked. The system tracks an object consistantly as is demonstrated by the low deviation of the results in the evaluation. The correlation filter-based tracking algorithm has proved to be useful in our research in cooperative mobile robots. A visual servoing system has been implemented using this tracking algorithm for convoying o..