Hi folks,
My name is John Daly and I work for a company called Neptec in Ottawa, Canada. We make 3d vision systems that we use for tracking the pose of objects through space.
Recently, we've been looking into buying a 6 degree of freedom robot manipulator to use to help with our testing. We want to mount the object we're tracking on our motion controller (which will take the object through some trajectory that we specify.) We'll then use our vision system to estimate the pose of the object as it moves in space. We are doing this part now.
What we'd like to use a robot for is to feed the estimated object pose to the robot and have its end effector track the object as it moves, without the robot actually knowing the object's trajectory ahead of time. (Picture a satellite moving through space, and a robot manipulator following the motion.) This will be useful for demonstrating the viability of our vision system as a useful sensor for object tracking.
I've been tasked with looking around and finding a suitable robot platform for this kind of thing. But, I really don't know anything about industrial robots and their controllers. We need a robot that can support a paylod of up to 50 lbs, and has a reach of around 2 m. I've talked to a few companies that sell robots that would meet the payload requirements. But, based on what I've heard from people, no one seems to think there would be a way to send the measured pose to the robot as it's computed and have the robot track the object as it moves. It seems that a lot of these industrial system involve giving the robot a trajectory ahead of time and then letting it execute that.
So, I'm wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of some companies or products that would be able to provide something to accomplish what it is we're looking to do.
I really appreciate the help!
Sincerely,
-John Daly