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Vision-guided Robotics: In Search of the Holy Grail
By Wes Iversen
February 2006
While vision-guided robot "bin-picking" of randomly located parts has long proved an elusive goal, there are signs that the technology may now finally be set to emerge.
For more than two decades, machine vision practitioners have been predicting the commercial emergence of robotic random bin-picking-the ability of vision-guided robot arms to locate and pick individual parts from a jumble of parts piled haphazardly in a bin or container.
Highly flexible, random bin-picking systems would produce major savings for manufacturers, the early proponents declared. Human workers would no longer be required to unload incoming parts bins shipped by suppliers. And on machining and production lines, randomized parts piled in bins could replace expensive fixturing, tooling and component feeders used for part orientation.
Unfortunately, the widespread exuberance for the technology in the early 1980s gave way to hard reality later on. The "bin-picking problem" proved more difficult than anticipated. Bin-picking systems developed in the laboratories, it turned out, didn't translate well into real-world factory applications. "The industry found out that this wasn't so easy. You had things like partial occlusion with overlapping parts, and lighting variations that really stymied the progress of bin-picking," notes Adil Shafi, president of Shafi Inc., a Brighton, Mich.-based software solutions provider that specializes in vision-guided robotics. A further complication was that computers of the time tended to choke on the massive amounts of processing required to successfully recognize parts piled randomly in a bin, and to calculate their 3D position and orientation for picking.
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