Don’t give me half the story!

Interesting Vision-guided robotics (VGR) story on the www.optics.org website. “Smarter vision system teaches robots to place parts” (January 14^th, 2014.) This describes work under in Norway to improve bin-picking performance.

This is important work, because contrary to what you see at every trade show, picking parts out of bins is really difficult. So I read the article carefully, twice, looking for details about what the Norwegians are doing that’s new.

Nothing. Zip. Nada. The photo shows a laser line, so I assume there’s some triangulation and probably point cloud generation going on, combined with meshing of points and importation into CAD. But I’m just guessing.

If asked, I’d also guess that Scorpion Vision is involved this effort. Thor isn’t usually shy about what his company is doing, so I imagine a press release will be forthcoming soon. But until then, please don’t tease me with half the story.