Development of a Robot Guided Optical Multisensory Inspection System for Inline Inspection of Cylinder Heads

The project RoboMAP is a cooperation of different partners from science and industry, including our institute. It aims at the development of an inspection system for quality assurance in the automotive industry. The objects to inspect are cylinder heads. In particular the valve seats and the valve stem guides are of special interest. The latter lie in the inner part of the cylinder head and are therefore difficult to access. The different kinds of geometry in combination with other goals, such as inline capability and flexibility regarding measurable object variants, impose the need for a new generation of optical measurement techniques. Tactile methods are not applicable, particularly because of their slow operating speed. A boost of flexibility is achieved by integrating a robot into the system in order to position the multi-sensor in an optimum configuration to the object for inspection. This additional capability is further exploited by integrating a single camera into the system which is used for detecting the cylinder head’s pose. Thus there is virtually no need for a predefined object position. Next to a general description of the project, we focus on the calibration of the system. Due to the various kinds of involved sub-systems, the overall calibration will be performed in separate steps yielding a network of transformations. As the object recognition is also being used for the calibration tasks, we give an overview of the approach we take. * Corresponding author