Automatic Robot Initialization Using an Optical Reflection Sensor

This paper describes an automatic initialization scheme for finding a point of coincidence between a robot's,internal coordinate system and the coordinate system of its work space.Our method uses an optical transmitter-receiver pair mounted on the end robot effector to scan a T-shaped planar target mounted on the work surface.An automated iterative method for moving a point on the end effector into precise coincidence with the expected point in the work space is shown to converge rapidly.