Spatial interactive projections in robot-based inspection systems

Due to major technological improvements over the last decades and a significant decrease in costs, electronic projection systems show great potential for providing innovative applications across industries. In most cases, projectors are used to display entire images onto contiguous plane surfaces, but with no active consideration of their three-dimensional environment. Since spatial interactive projections promise new possibilities to display information in the manufacturing industry, we developed a practical approach to how common projection systems can be integrated into a working space and interact with their environment. In order to display information in a spatially dependent manner, a projection model was introduced along with a calibration method for mapping. Subsequently, the approach was validated in the context of robot-based optical inspection systems where texture projections are applied onto sheet metal parts as references features, exclusively to designated regions. The results show that accurate region-specific projections were possible within the calibrated projection volume. In addition, the accuracy and computing speed were investigated to identify limitations. Our approach for interactive projections supports the transfer to other application areas, enables us to rethink current manual and automated procedures and processes in which visualized information benefits the task of interest, and provides new functionalities for manufacturing industries.