Visual Servo Robots with two hands – dual-armed robots that “see”

There are many dual-armed robots in use in indus­try today for sev­er­al pur­pos­es, rang­ing from pack­ing to assem­bly to pick and place. Some of these robots have vision sen­sors and are known as visu­al-ser­vo robots.

Visu­al-ser­vo-ing has been around since the 1980s. This robot­ic ​“sight” gives robots the abil­i­ty to improve their accu­ra­cy and per­for­mance in the work­place. The tech­nique is fair­ly sim­ple. The robot is pro­grammed to inter­act with a cer­tain item. A cam­era attached to the robot takes a pic­ture of each item that comes into the robot’s work area. If the item does not match the visu­al-ser­vo robot’s pro­grammed algo­rithm, it is rejected.

Visu­al-ser­vo robot­ic sys­tems can range from the sin­gle-armed, six-axis robots that per­form in fac­to­ries every day. How­ev­er, it is the visu­al-ser­vo dual-armed robot­ic sys­tems that are very inter­est­ing. The dual-armed robots, which already some­what resem­ble humans, are able to now have the sense of sight to help them in their two-armed tasks, whether each arm is work­ing inde­pen­dent­ly, or they are work­ing together.

By using the visu­al feed­back in the visu­al-ser­vo robot, the robot can track mul­ti­ple items and han­dle dif­fer­ent sized and shaped objects. This gives man­u­fac­tur­ers the abil­i­ty to change the items on the line with­out hav­ing to go through and repro­gram every robot for each prod­uct they run.

While robots many nev­er have real eyes like a human, visu­al-ser­vo robot sys­tems are get­ting them pret­ty close to the real thing. And with the way tech­nol­o­gy is going, who knows what the future may hold for robot­ic visu­al-ser­vo systems.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor for Fanuc, Motoman, ABB, Uni­ver­sal Robots, and KUKA robot­ics, has sev­er­al robot mod­els avail­able for cus­tomiza­tion and pur­chase that can be out­fit­ted with visu­al-ser­vo sys­tems to help the robot see.

For more infor­ma­tion about how these vision sys­tems can help your robot­ic automa­tion, con­tact Robots​.com today online or at 877−762−6881.