Low-Cost system for object positioning through laser-camera triangulation

Abstract

The programming of automation systems, namely roboticsystems, is generally too complex and time spending for the industryscurrent needs. Particularly, in the most developed countries, where theindustry is driven by small production series. To this kind of factorymodel the setup time is far too high compared to the actual productiontime. Therefore it is necessary to develop new techniques and make useof high end sensors that allow very flexible solutions.In this paper, it will be presented a low-cost system that obtains the 3Dmodel of an object through laser/camera triangulation and then calculatesthe objects position and orientation by means of a non-analyticalcost function, which is minimized through conjugate-gradient algorithm.The position result can then be send to a robotic manipulator. Conceptslike camera calibration, image processing, 3D reconstruction and datamerge will be presented in this article.