Form-Fitting, Large-Area Sensor Mounting for Obstacle Detection

TL;DR

This paper presents a cost-effective, calibration-free method for mounting sensors on robot links using CAD-designed skin units that conform to complex surfaces, enabling large-area obstacle detection with fixed sensor positions.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel CAD-based approach for creating sensor mounts that fit nondevelopable robot surfaces, simplifying sensor deployment and coverage.

Findings

Successfully mounted ToF sensors on a robot arm using the skin units.

Generated obstacle point clouds covering large areas without sensor calibration.

Demonstrated effective obstacle detection in a real robot environment.

Abstract

We introduce a low-cost method for mounting sensors onto robot links for large-area sensing coverage that does not require the sensor's positions or orientations to be calibrated before use. Using computer aided design (CAD), a robot skin covering, or skin unit, can be procedurally generated to fit around a nondevelopable surface, a 3D surface that cannot be flattened into a 2D plane without distortion, of a robot. The skin unit embeds mounts for printed circuit boards of any size to keep sensors in fixed and known locations. We demonstrate our method by constructing point cloud images of obstacles within the proximity of a Franka Research 3 robot's operational environment using an array of time of flight (ToF) imagers mounted on a printed skin unit and attached to the robot arm.