A low-cost robot guidance vision system

Describes some of the technology underpinning a new generation of systems. The sensor is attached to the robot, such that it is parallel to the welding torch or other tool, via an additional rotary axis allowing independent control of the sensor viewing direction. Operating on the basis of triangulation with a laser stripe, the sensor returns a standard video signal to the sensor controller. The sensor interface and acquisition board extracts the laser stripe from the video image in real time reducing the signal from 2-D to 1-D. From this point on binary image processing is used.<
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