Sensor Review: Volume 1 Issue 2

Paving the way for robots which will see and feel

Whilst vision tends to steal the limelight, touch sensors are likely to bring an earlier and better return on investment. At the Robot Vision and Sensory Controls Conference held…

Why carbon fibres can give robots a strong sense of grip

M.H.E. Larcombe

Carbon fibre tactile sensors, under development for at least the last five years, produce a resistance change under pressure. They could therefore offer potential as sensors in…

Finding the edge on steel with stereoscopic vision

Peter Loose

A British company has developed a two‐camera system which can be used on‐line to find the precise width of steel strip. The system can be calibrated away from the hostile…

Getting involved with vision

Now the pressure is on for vision to go commercial several companies are making strenuous efforts to produce viable systems. One such UK company is Smith Associates who are making…

Borrowing from the eyes to create robot vision algorithms

C. Braccini, G. Gambardella, G. Sandini, V. Tagliasco

A technique in which the features of retinal receptors, receptive fields of the peripheral cells and cortical retinotopic mapping can be combined to perform a template matching…

The force‐torque sensor that helps a robot to put an oil pump together

A force‐torque sensor developed by the Institute of Flight Systems Dynamics at Wessling, West Germany, is said to have proved to be of value in deburring and assembly tasks with…

Developing and evaluating image processing alogorithms

D.H. Mott

The industrial environment offers many potential applications for image processing, especially in inspection for quality, automatic assembly and the guidance of robotic devices…

A sense of touch begins to gather momentum

Leon D. Harmon

An extensive survey of over 300 reports worldwide shows that the state‐of‐the‐art in tactile sensing — defined as continuously variable touch sensing over an area where there is…

How vision is helping Unika take the correct welding path

I. Masaki, R.R. Gorman, D.C. Jordon, T.H. Lindbom, M.J. Dunne, H. Toda

Unika is a prototype robot — the product of work by Unimation in the US and Kawasaki in Japan — which by means of vision can detect the deviation between a taught standard path…