Publication

Vision systems are more and more employed in robotic applications to perceive the surrounding environment and to make decisions accordingly. Despite this, the 3D reconstruction is a non-trivial problem for thin deformable linear objects. The cameras on the market that allow the 3D modelling of very small objects are bulky and expensive, and as a consequence cannot be easily integrated with a robotic system. This paper proposes a stereo vision system completely integrable into the robot end-effector, composed of two low-cost off-the-shelf endoscopic cameras with the aim of detecting tiny wires in the scene and identifying their location and diameter. The proposed method splices state-of-the-art vision algorithms applied to macro cameras obtaining, for wires with a diameter of few millimeters or less than a millimeter, a diameter estimation error lower than 10% and a location estimation error lower than 3%. The presented approach can be generalized to different types of endoscopic cameras and thin target objects.