Process and quality control with a video camera, for a floor-tilling robot

The paper describes the development of a floor-tiling robot. Both the development and the performance measurements of the robot were carried out with a graphic simulation system. Based on those measurements and on a time study of the corresponding manual work, the robot's work output is expected to be 2-5 times higher than that of the manual work. It was decided to concentrate, at this stage of the development, on the robot's autonomy at a workstation, which means that all operations at a workstation - stabilizing and calibrating, loading tiles, etc. - including real-time quality assurance (QA) are done without human intervention, while the transfer between workstations is assisted by an operator. The QA function has to identify the exact location and orientation of tiles to be taken, since they may be expected to differ from those specified in the robot's program. This is needed in order to allow accurate placing of the tiles in straight lines and with a uniform distance between them. Additionally, the QA function has to identify defective tiles. A computer vision system was developed to perform the QA functions. The prototype, its operational principles, and the experiments are described. The system's limitations are discussed together with needs for further research. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.