A Method of Automatic Sensor Placement for Robot Vision in Inspection Tasks

This paper presents an automatic sensor placement technique for robot vision in inspection tasks. In such vision systems, a sensor often needs to be moved from one pose to another around the object to sample all features of interest. Multiple 3D images are taken from different vantage points. The technique involves deciding the optimal sensor placements and a shortest path through these viewpoints for automatic generation of an inspection plan. A viewpoint is expressed by N parameters and a topology of viewpoints is achieved by genetic algorithm. The inspection plan is evaluated using a min-max criterion and the shortest path is determined by Christofides algorithm. In addition, a computation example is presented to illustrate the techniques and algorithms.