Investigation and development of visual analysis and environment description systems for autonomous manipulative robots

This article describes how hardware and software facilities developed for the analysis and description of the environment of autonomous manipulative robots are being used in the development of practical technical vision systems for robots manipulating industrial parts in partially organized environments and with arbitrary three-dimensional scenes. Topics considered include a prototype image input device (IID), an active description system for a limited range of components, and the development of systems for the visual analysis and description of arbitrary three-dimensional scenes consisting of objects of admissible classes (a universal filter for processing brightness and depth images, the representation of a contour image by straight line segments using a Bell approximation, approximation of a collection of points of a depth image by quadratic surfaces)