Task 5 - Implementation of Visual Servo Control

A full-implementation of visual servo control functionality turned out to be more complicated as expected. High performance losses in the Bowden-cables due to friction effects compel us to reconstruct the drive system in a radical manner. Due to the reconstruction of the drive coupling, there is unfortunately not enough time left to implement visual servo control with all functionalities. For that reason, we decided to downgrade the visual capabilities of the ALEXA robot.

Task 6 - Construction and calibration of the camera system

As presented in our concept, we are using two color cameras. The first camera is mounted on the first link. It is provided for object recognition and position estimation. The second camera is located in the gripper. It is provided for precise position determination. All cameras were successfully installed.

Task 7 - System Testing

We will present our ALEXA robot on the AUTOMATICA trade fair in Munich at hall B3 booth 510. The public presentation will show some capabilities of the robot that we will also show with the final experiment setup. Further, this scenario allows us for a first system testing. It will show how the ALEXA robot is working in industrial applications.

Further Occurrences

We wrote a paper with all important results of our ALEXA experiments. The paper is the first of at least two. It was accepted for the ECHORD workshop that takes place at the ICRA 2012 in St. Paul, USA.