Toyoda Koki Kabushiki Kaisha

Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha

Osamu Matsuda

Shigeo Hotta

Kazuhiko Sugita

Yoichi Yamakawa

Hajime Fukami

Yasufumi Tokura

Fumihiko Komuro

Akira Shimokoshi

Toshio Matsumura

A robot system for taking out workpieces from a box using a robot having a floating hand and a workpiece recognition apparatus. The workpiece recognition apparatus detects the position and inclination of a selected workpiece, and calculates a target position and a desired inclined posture of the hand. The posture is so decided that a line of intersection of the floating plane of the hand with a vertical plane containing the longitudinal axis of the workpiece, becomes parallel to a horizontal direction, and the center axis of the wrist portion becomes perpendicular to the line of intersection. Data indicating the target position and the desired inclined posture are transmitted to the robot controller of the system, so that the controller drives the servomotors of the robot in such a way that the hand moves toward the target position with a desired inclined posture. With this operation, the hand contacts with the selected workpiece at a predetermined position to pick up the workpiece.

Method and apparatus for controlling a robot having a floating hand

A method and a system for recognizing the location of a cylindrical shaft is provided for use in positioning an end effector of an industrial robot which handles said shaft. In the method and system, a multilevel gray image of the cylindrical shaft which is generated by a change coupled device (CCD) image sensor is first differentiated, and the absolute values of picture elements constituting the differentiated gray image are then binarized on the basis of a threshold value so as to extract an accentuated pattern image which is inherent to the shape of the cylindrical shaft. The accentuated pattern image thus extracted is then collated with a reference accentuated pattern image (template) so as to generate a normal curve signal which has its peak point at a position where the axis of said cylindrical shaft is located. The normal curve data is then binarized on the basis of another predetermined threshold value to generate a single strip image. The center of the single strip image is calculated to determine the location of the cylindrical shaft.

Object recognition system for a robot

A method for teaching a machining line to be machined is disclosed. A borderline is formed along the machining line on a workpiece. Then, a borderline sensor is moved across the borderline at each sensing position. The positions of the sensor are stored as a teaching position at each time when the borderline is detected by the sensor. The sensing interval between each teaching position is automatically adjusted according to the change in the curvature of the borderline. At the place where the curvature of the borderline becomes large, the sensing interval is shortened in order to maintain teaching accuracy.

Method for teaching a machining line

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Kariya, Japan

Osamu Matsuda