Welcome to the intermediate presentation of my bachelor thesis.

My name is Nico Wertli and I’m

working on laser-guided mobile manipulation.

[Picture Laser Marker] [Picture Kinova effector]

What is it all about?
This project aims to develop an intuitive way for builders to guide robotic building construction tasks,
for example drilling holes. A construction worker sets up a laser marker, which is used as a reference
position. The SWACO construction robot should then execute the desired task fully autonomously. The
kinova end-effector is equipped with one color- and two monochrome-cameras. My plan is to use just
the color camera for the bachelor thesis. However for further research on improving accuracy one
could also include these monochrome cameras.

[Video of laser_detector]
To start off with computer vision, I wrote a first software module that analyses the color footage.
The image on the top left corner is the rectified output of the color camera and is the input feed of this
software module. The image processing into a red filter mask on the top right and a canny edge
detection computation on the bottom left corner. The combination of these two techniques result in a
significant output. Where we can use the Hough transformation to detect a good match of the actual
laser lines.

[Image of Line Reconstruction]

To determine the three dimensional position of the laser crosshair we triangulate the lines found of two
convenient perspectives. For each image the epipolar beam of the displayed line is processed. The
position of the laser line can be estimated with the intersection of the two epipolar beams. Displayed in
red you can see the actual laser cross and in blue our estimation.

[Image Back Projection]

This estimation can be used for further optimization. The estimated laser cross is projected on each
feasible image and compared with the real cross. An optimization algorithm should minimize these
back-projection errors to improve the accuracy of our estimation.
method

results

problem/next steps