Picking your VGR technology

There are quite a few different ways of providing vision guidance to a robot; the challenge is in determining which is best for your application. There’s a good overview of the options in the September 2009 edition of Assembly, “Robotics: Guidance Goes 3D” (John Sprovieri, August 26, 2009.)

One thing to note though is that Vision Guided Robotics (VGR) is a broad tent covering many different types of task. Some of the easier jobs, (although that’s a relative term,) involve determining the exact position of a target so that the robot can orient itself for part pick up or placement. At the almost impossible end of the VGR spectrum lies the random bin picking job.

The Assembly article is, in my humble opinion, a little brief on the complexities of random bin picking. This has been the “Holy Grail” of VGR research for many years, and while I’ve no doubt that the practitioners – Braintech and Adenovation, for example – are inching closer to industrially robust systems, I’m still a skeptic. In a factory environment there are just so many environmental variables outside the control of the integrator.

I’m sure that in the next few years we’ll see a big increase in the adoption of VGR, but for now it’s a “bleeding edge” technology to be attempted only by the very bold.