A Machine Vision Approach to Seam Sensing for High-Speed Robotic Sealing

In industrial assembly lines, seam sealing is a painting process used for making watertight seals or for preventing rusting. In the process, sealant is painted on seams located at the joints of pressed metal parts. We developed a sealing robot system that adjusts the sealing gun motion adaptively to the seam position sensed by a range sensor (a scanning laser rangefinder which senses profile range data). In this paper, we propose a high-speed and highly reliable algorithm for seam position computation from the sensed profile range data around the seam. It is proved experimentally that the sealing robot system used with the developed algorithm is very effective, especially for reducing wasted sealant. key words: machine vision, laser rangefinder, seam sealing, industrial robots