Tamao Okamoto

Development of a flexible robot technology for supporting cell-based production

In the manufacturing process of the HUTOP cycle, providing operation support from the viewpoint of the operator is an important issue. The virtual factory assumes a flexible U-shaped production cell. This research intends to develop the basic concepts of an experimental robot, which flexibly moves and supports cell-based production. Based on the flexible mobile system, the program-free visual recognition system is integrated to confirm each function on an experimental basis. This facilitates the development of a human-friendly cell-production support robot.

Programless visual inspection with flexible arm camera

When inspection equipment based on visual recognition is installed in production sites, the recognition criterion is custom designed to satisfy the inspection specification, normally requiring constant attention and software modifications by specialty engineers. This paper proposes the Programless (Programming-free) visual recognition technology aiming at an automatic visual inspection system that has a self tuning mechanism and can also be easily tuned by factory workers. A camera system for visual inspection is mounted on a robot arm with flexible electronic components, which enables the users to perform positioning of the inspection equipment in an intuitive manner. The proposed system allows to provide a novel method of visual inspection and to reduce the technical complexity of the handling of visual inspection equipment.