Optical Proximity Sensor Systems for Intelligent Robot Hands

Optical proximity sensors are low-level vision sensors delivering low- and mid-range multidimensional information about the robots end-effector environment. Due to the fast signal processing they can be easily integrated in real-time robot control tasks. The paper presents the basic mechanical, hardware and software design principles of such a sensor, which uses distance measurement via optical triangulation as the basic method. For special robot tasks, special mechanical and hardware arrangements of the basic sensor type are needed. Two examples are shown for demonstration purposes. Possible applications are simple distance sensor devices, two-dimensional orientation sensors and optical robot teach-in units. Accuracy and efficiency of the sensor system are documented by using the sensor for recognizing holes and following arbitrary unknown contours.