Robust robotic manipulation

Robotic systems based on visual recognition are increasingly more difficult to implement in real time as the complexity and the number of target objects increases. Flexible robotic implementations require a 3D scene understanding. To obtain robust 3D information in active sensor based on depth from defocusing technique is implemented. The algorithm involves calculating distance to points in a scene using the relative blurring between two images detected with two different focal settings. These images are acquired by splitting the image of the scene and capturing them with two CCD sensors with a physical known distance between sensor planes. The recognition algorithm uses a variant of eigenimage analysis. This approach computes the eigenspace determined by processing the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the each image set. Each image set is obtained by varying the post of each object in space. Also, details of the local image processing used for localization and the centering of the object are presented and discussed. The presented system has been successfully implemented and tested on several real world scenes.