Cost Effective Real Time Vision Interface for Off Line Simulation of Fanuc Robots

The proliferation of automation has created an increasing demand for robots in every area of the manufacturing industry. FANUC robots are very widely used in automated production lines because of its intelligent functions with flexible open architecture. It allows the users to plugin online additional components such as vision and sensor systems to support the development of robotic systems. FANUC also has an offline simulation tool called Roboguide, which allows the users to simulate a virtual robotic cell in 3D, eliminating the need for expensive physical prototype setup. This tool supports the virtual integration of an integral Robot Vision (iRVision) capabilities. However, this feature is limited to virtual vision or using very expensive FANUC compatible cameras that allow the users to take a real mode image and simulate it in the virtual world. In this paper, we propose an offline plugin for interfacing normal cameras of any type including webcams to the FANUC iRVision system for the virtual simulation of real mode images. It was developed using an Open Computer Vision (OCV) plugin and tested it by physically capturing the real image of the object using a webcam interfaced with the iRVision system and processed it on the virtual robot controller. The test results show that this cost-effective plugin can be used as an OCV in industrial automation and robotic building system without any compromise in terms of performance and quality.