Forming Models Of Plane-And-Cylinder Faceled Bodies From Light Stripes

A system is described which uses light stripe input to construct 3-D body models useful for automatic assembly. Special hardware can extract a stripe from a TV picture in about 02 second. Clusters of stripes from single surfaces in the body, and hence the equations of the surfaces themselves, are found by a program which forms hypotheses based on clues in the data and then tries to establish them. The resulting surface equations and the stripe evidence for them are used to produce the body model, which is a union of convex subsets of three-space formed as intersections of (possibly complemented) half-spaces and solid cylinders.