Occlusion Handling for Industrial Robots

Industrial robots contain minimal sensing capability beyond recognition of their internal state. It is critical that an external vision system should cover the designated robot work space with awareness of blind spots and occlusions. This work presents two mechanisms to handle occlusions in an external multi-robot vision system: occlusion-aware optimal sensor positioning, and event-driven occlusion detection. When deploying sensors to the system, various scenarios are considered during optimization to reduce potential occlusions and increase sensor coverage. These methods are tested on a working cell with three industrial robot arms. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scenario-based multi-objective optimization for sensor positioning. Once the sensors are deployed, occlusion detection is actively triggered prior to robot path planning.