Vision-based control of an autonomous disassembly station

In the EU about 10 millions of used cars have to be wrecked per year. So th e disposal of these cars is of increasing importance in the next years. In a disassembly process for used cars one has to cope with the objects in an undefined state in contrast to the car production. For this purpose the use of vision-based control is motivated and a vision guided robotic system fo r an autonomous disassembly process is presented in this paper. An active s tereo camera system is used as vision sensor. A combination of gray value a nd contour-based object recognition and a position measurement approach wit h implicit detection of occlusions is described. A system for the autonomou s disassembly of wheels was successfully tested and shown in a final presen tation. In this demonstrator a stereo vision system, a force-torque sensor, a task planning module, and a special unscrewing tool were integrated. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.