Vision-based control of an autonomous disassembly station

In the EU about 10 millions of used cars have to be wrecked per year. So the disposal of these cars is of increasing importance in the next years. In a disassembly process for used cars one has to cope with the objects in an undefined state in contrast to the car production. For this purpose the use of vision-based control is motivated and a vision guided robotic system for an autonomous disassembly process is presented in this paper. An active stereo camera system is used as vision sensor. A combination of gray value and contour-based object recognition and a position measurement approach with implicit detection of occlusions is described. A system for the autonomous disassembly of wheels was successfully tested and shown in a final presentation. In this demonstrator a stereo vision system, a force-torque sensor, a task planning module, and a special unscrewing tool were integrated. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.