Optical sensory work surface for a robot manipulator system

Abstract A low-cost robot sensor system based on light sensitive tiles and an associated microcomputer has been developed to investigate the use of sensory feedback in the control of a robot manipulator. The construction of the sensor tile is described together with an outline of the microcomputer-system, which is based on the Hitachi 64180 microprocessor. Object location and recognition software has been written to enable the performance of the sensor tile to be assessed. The operation of this software is described to illustrate one possible approach to the analysis of the sensor surface images. Some results are presented which show the use of the sensor tile and image analysis software to locate and recognize conduit couplings.