Task Planning of Assembly of Flexible Objects and Vision-Based Verification

The ability of manipulating flexible objects, such as rubber belts and paper sheets, is important in automated manufacturing systems. This paper describes a novel approach to vision-guided assembly of flexible objects. The operation dealt with in this paper is to assemble a rubber belt with fixed pulleys. By analyzing possible states of the belt based on the empirical knowledge of the belt, we can derive a method to have not only the action planning but also the visual verification planning. We have implemented a belt assembly system using the two manipulators and a laser range finder as the sensor, and succeeded in performing the belt-pulley assembly. Extension of our approach to other kinds of assembly of flexible objects is also discussed. Robotica, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 297-307, 1998. in the special issue on “Intelligent Robotic Assembly.”