WALKING OF A DELTA ROBOT IN IMAGE SPACE

The Delta robot with the custom built eye in hand CMOS camera is successfully controlled to walk along a PCB trace that is visually feedback. The trace, that is used to demonstrate the performance of the system, contains not only smooth but also right angle paths. However, the overall working accuracy is still within two and a half millimeters as the probe is staying on the trace all the way. The elliptic convolution scanning is proposed to determine the walking direction from an acquired image. The major and minor axes of the elliptic mask are designed to fit the walking direction and the width of the trace respectively. In this way, the elliptic mask, that is best sit on the trace in image space, indicates the direction the robot should walk. The custom built vision system acquires and processes image at 30 fps. The walking command is then sent via TCP/UDP to the Delta robot's controller which is run at a much higher servo rate (2000 Hz). The probe unit is designed and built to verify the working accuracy of the proposed system.