Visual servoing-based paired structured light robot system for estimation of 6-DOF structural displacement

This study aims to demonstrate the feasibility of a visual servoing-based paired structured light (SL) robot for estimating structural displacement under various external loads. The former paired SL robot, which was proposed in the previous study, was composed of two screens facing with each other, each with one or two lasers and a camera. It was found that the paired SL robot could estimate the translational and rotational displacement each in 3-DOF with high accuracy and low cost. However, the measurable range is fairly limited due to the limited screen size. In this paper, therefore, a visual servoing-based 2-DOF manipulator which controls the pose of lasers is introduced. By controlling the positions of the projected laser points to be on the screen, the proposed robot can estimate the displacement regardless of the screen size. We performed various simulations and experimental tests to verify the performance of the newly proposed robot. The results show that the proposed system overcomes the range limitation of the former system and it can be utilized to accurately estimate the structural displacement. © ICROS 2011.