Robotic Arms Avoid Collision

Videos show a new program that lets robotic arms in a factory gracefully avoid each other.

Kristina Grifantini 12/06/2009

3 Comments

Experimental software developed by Harris Corporation, an international communication equipment company, could help make robots less clumsy and dangerous.

The software allows a factory robot to sense and avoid objects while still moving quickly.

Harris Corporation engineer Paul Bosscher described the technology at last month's 2009 IEEE's Technologies for Practical Robot Applications conference in Woburn, MA.

The software creates a virtual "shell" around the robot's arm, allowing it to avoid obstacles in combination with machine vision. Bosscher says the company has applied for a patent and may try to market the collision avoidance program to businesses.

The video below shows using the software to automatically avoid another robot:

Video

In another clip, the robot avoids a red ball:

Video

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ECF

9 Comments

798 Days Ago
12/08/2009

Hahah! it looks just like my cat when he doesn't want to be petted!

wljiang

2 Comments

787 Days Ago
12/19/2009

impressive indeed

This is impressive and practical indeed!
Collision avoidance with humans and other dynamic objects has always been a topic in industrial robotics area.
I wonder how many cameras are used, how are they mounted, and how much "standardization" (enough light,no shadow,etc.) of the environment has to be made in order to make the vision system work.

paulbosscher

1 Comment

757 Days Ago
01/18/2010

Re: impressive indeed

This particular vision system is just a single camera mounted at the end of the table (the view is shown in the second video). Here we take advantage of the known object features (shape, size, color) to recognize the ball and determine its 3D location. For arbitrary objects you would just need a stereo vision system or something similar to extract 3D locations of objects.