Autonomous Robot-Guided Inspection System Based on Offline Programming and RGB-D Model

Automatic optical inspection (AOI) is a control process for precisely evaluating the completeness and quality of manufactured products with the help of visual information. Automatic optical inspection systems include cameras, light sources, and objects; AOI requires expert operators and time-consuming setup processes. In this study, a novel autonomous industrial robot-guided inspection system was hypothesized and developed to expedite and ease inspection process development. The developed platform is an intuitive and interactive system that does not require a physical object to test or an industrial robot; this allows nonexpert operators to perform object inspection planning by only using scanned data. The proposed system comprises an offline programming (OLP) platform and three-dimensional/two-dimensional (3D/2D) vision module. A robot program generated from the OLP platform is mapped to an industrial manipulator to scan a 3D point-cloud model of an object by using a laser triangulation sensor. After a reconstructed 3D model is aligned with a computer-aided design model on a common coordinate system, the OLP platform allows users to efficiently fine-tune the required inspection positions on the basis of the rendered images. The arranged inspection positions can be directed to an industrial manipulator on a production line to capture real images by using the corresponding 2D camera/lens setup for AOI tasks. This innovative system can be implemented in smart factories, which are easily manageable from multiple locations. Workers can save scanned data when new inspection positions are included based on cloud data. The present system provides a new direction to cloud-based manufacturing industries and maximizes the flexibility and efficiency of the AOI setup process to increase productivity.