Author : A. Pichler, H. Bauer, C. Eberst, C. Heindl, J. Minichberger

• Keywords : Automatic robot programming, industrial robotics, 3D computer vision

Building to order implies responding to individual customer requests, not simply producing large numbers of goods for stock and encouraging their sale by promotion and discounting. The paint shop is one of the biggest bottlenecks in pro-duction today. Adapting state-of-the-art robotized painting lines to new variants is time-consuming and leaving the line in a non-productive state. To overcome the limitations of state-of-the-art robotizes painting system - that are economically not viable at small lotsizes, the Flexpaint project (2000 - 2002) did develop a new "what you see is what you paint" ap-proach. This approach scans unknown parts being transported to the painting cabinet, reconstructs their geometry and painting-relevant features, and automatically plans the painting strokes and executable - collision free - trajectories. Fi-nally robot code is automatically generated and executed by the painting robots. The Flexpaint system poses a new para-digm in the frame of agile manufacturing. Resorting to 3D sensing technology in a precedent step to the task planning process proved the fitness of that concept for small volume high variant painting in experiments.
This paper presents an extension of the "what you see is what you paint" approach by means of dynamic vision and 3D object recognition that is able to complement missing data of scanned parts by use of CAD information of recognized and localized parts.