A robot vision system with hand held stereo cameras for applications in engine exhaustion

In this work a new robot vision system is presented with a movable stereo camera pair mounted at a robot's hand. The vision system can be moved to different positions for varying views by the robot. Even with cameras with static parameters a course-to-fine strategy for object recognition and pose measurement is practicable in this way. Another advantage of this approach is that the vision, system acts as an input sensor for both the recognition process and the position recovery. So in this application a computational expensive data fusion and the calibration of different sensors is not necessary. Due to the complex 3D structure of the scent a new stereo algorithm with implicit detection of occlusions is integrated in the system. The complete system has been successfully tested for the task of automatic drying up a small engine.