Automation of assembly task in distribution power line work and its application to outdoor environment field

This paper describes the practical application of robot vision techniques to electricity distribution work. To cope with variable outdoor lighting conditions and diverse backgrounds due to unstructured outdoor environments, we have developed two methods of detecting an object's 3D position using both 2D gray-scale image and 3D range image. The first method locates a target object as a 2D image taken at a distance. Although the resolution of a 3D range image taken from the same position is too low to extract the object's surface geometry, it is effective to eliminate the background section from the 2D image based on the distance threshold. The second method generates an online template image of the object to be worked on. This enables reliable real-time visual tracking by stereovision despite the variations of the object's shape and appearance. Here we show how these methods are implemented and effectively used in distribution work.