Flexible vision based control for micro-factories

In the micro-manipulation field, the adoption of vision-based strategies can suitably support the motion system in easily performing precise manipulation operations. In this context, the cooperation between the robot and the vision system is fundamental to achieve high performance. The paper introduces and critically discusses the main issues related to the design and implementation of vision-based control for a micromanipulation work-cell. The core issues of the developed software architecture, such as the work-cell calibration and the task execution module, are described and its main characteristics highlighted. The application of this program within a micro-assembly work-cell set-up allowed the execution of various manipulation operations, thus representing a test bench for its capabilities evaluation. The actual execution of a pick&place task is finally discussed.