Development of a stereo vision system for industrial robots

Machine vision systems become to play an important role in robot based factory automation, because they enable robots to recognize the environment around the workspace like human visual systems and make the manufacturing process flexible. So a large number of 2-dimensional (2D) vision systems have been successfully applied for industrial robots, but there are increasing needs for 3-dimensional (3D) vision systems providing accurate 3D position of work-pieces. For the 3D vision system, the stereo vision based position measurement systems have been applied in various fields. However the stereo vision systems which have been applied were specific for their particular tasks only. This paper introduces a general-purpose stereo vision system applicable to wide range of tasks with industrial robots.