Recognition of dynamic environments for robotic assembly on moving workpieces

Automated robotic assembly on a moving workpiece, referred to as assembly in motion, demands that the assembly robot is synchronised in all degrees of freedom to the moving workpiece, on which assembly parts are installed. Currently, this requirement cannot be met due to the lack of robust recognition of the 3D position and the trajectory of the moving workpiece. In this paper, an assembly robot-guided, monocular camera system approaching this problem of recognition of dynamic environments is introduced, which considers the motion trajectory of the workpiece as a linear combination of trajectory bases, such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) bases. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to reconstruct arbitrary trajectories of a predefined assembly point on the workpiece moving in 3D space. The limitation of the developed method of environment recognition for robotic assembly in motion is also analysed.