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Practical application of a robot in a structured, yet unknown environment, such as in bridge maintenance, requires the robot to quickly generate an accurate map of the surfaces in the environment. A consistent and complete map is fundamental to achieving reliable and robust operation. In a real-world and field application, sensor noise and insufficient exploration oftentimes result in an incomplete map. This paper presents a robust environment mapping approach using prior knowledge in combination with a single depth camera mounted on the end-effector of a robotic manipulator. The approach has been successfully implemented in an industrial setting for the purpose of steel bridge maintenance. A prototype robot, which includes the presented map building approach in its software package, has recently been delivered to industry.

This paper presents an approach for frequent hand-eye calibration of an Infrared (IR) range camera mounted to the end-effector of a robot manipulator in field applications. Currently, an existing approach has demonstrated the cost-effective use of reflector discs to detect distinct feature points for hand-eye calibration. In this paper, the approach is further improved to increase the accuracy and reliability which are both necessary for practical field use. The improvements include a morphological operation in reflector disc detection, an averaged hand-eye transform from strategically selected camera viewpoints, and a fault recovery procedure. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to increase calibration accuracy by 18 times and can be reliably used in the field by an inexperienced operator.335 Marcelo Ang, Guilin Yang, Kin Huat Low and Albert Causo (Eds.) Proc. of the 3rd IFToMM Intl. Symposium on Robotics and Mechatronics (ISRM 2013) 337 ous data. Overall, the proposed improvements further automates and simplifies the hand-eye calibration procedure to be usable by a field operator with no in-depth knowledge of calibration.The paper is structured as follows; Section 2 presents an overview of the existing hand-eye calibration approach, while Section 3 describes the proposed improvements, including the morphological operation to improve reflector disc detection, the technique for viewpoint selection and hand-eye transform averaging, and improvements in fault tolerance. Section 4 presents experimental results and Section 5 concludes and discusses future work. AbstractThe technologies of robotics and automation are more demanded than ever for nuclear power plants and the other nuclear facilities, after the accidents at TEPCO's Fukushima 1st Nuclear Power Plant following the earthquake and tsunami on March 11th, 2011. Technical Committee on Robotics and Automation in Nuclear Facilities was founded as a TC of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. This talk will cover the specific technical issues related to robotics for decommissioning TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The future possibility of robotics solutions in particular with the use of humanoid robots are also discussed. AbstractManufacturing is an important driver of Singapore's economy, contributing to more than 20% of its GDP and employing more than 500,000 people. Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), a research institute under the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) of Singapore, was established in 1993 as part of the national initiative to restructure Singapore into a knowledge-based and technology-driven