Comparison of 3D Sensors for Automating Bolt-Tightening Operations in the Automotive Industry.

Machine vision systems are widely used in assembly lines for providing sensing abilities to robots to allow them to handle dynamic environments. This paper presents a comparison of 3D sensors for evaluating which one is best suited for usage in a machine vision system for robotic fastening operations within an automotive assembly line. The perception system is necessary for taking into account the position uncertainty that arises from the vehicles being transported in an aerial conveyor.

Autonomous Scene Exploration for Robotics: A Conditional Random View-Sampling and Evaluation Using a Voxel-Sorting Mechanism for Efficient Ray Casting.

Carrying out the task of the exploration of a scene by an autonomous robot entails a set of complex skills, such as the ability to create and update a representation of the scene, the knowledge of the regions of the scene which are yet unexplored, the ability to estimate the most efficient point of view from the perspective of an explorer agent and, finally, the ability to physically move the system to the selected Next Best View (NBV). This paper proposes an autonomous exploration system that makes use of a dual OcTree representation to encode the regions in the scene which are occupied, free, and unknown. The NBV is estimated through a discrete approach that samples and evaluates a set of view hypotheses that are created by a conditioned random process which ensures that the views have some chance of adding novel information to the scene.