Perception and Sensors
Bin Picking: What 3D Vision Accuracy Do You Actually Need?
Pose accuracy of 0.5 to 2 mm and 1 to 3 degrees is enough for most bin picking, because the gripper absorbs the rest. What actually breaks...
Section 07
Perception and Sensors
What robots measure, how precisely, and where the measurement quietly fails.
Perception and Sensors
Event Cameras: Where They Beat Frame Cameras
An event camera reports per-pixel brightness changes asynchronously instead of whole frames on a clock. That gives microsecond-scale...
Perception and Sensors
Force Torque Sensors: Which Numbers Actually Matter
Size on resolution and noise, not on rated range. A sensor rated to 500 N with 0.5 N of noise is worse for a 20 N assembly task than one...
Perception and Sensors
Hand-Eye Calibration: How Much Error Is Acceptable
A careful hand-eye calibration reaches 0.2 to 0.8 mm of residual error on a mid-size arm. Anything above 1.5 mm usually means the procedure...
Perception and Sensors
IMU Drift: How Fast a Robot Loses Its Heading
A consumer-grade gyroscope with a bias stability of 10 degrees per hour accumulates about 0.17 degrees per minute of heading error, and on...
Perception and Sensors
LiDAR vs Stereo vs Time-of-Flight for Robots
Choose by surface, then range, then cost. Structured light gives the best short-range accuracy, typically 0.05 to 0.5 mm at 0.5 m, and...
Perception and Sensors
The Lighting Mistakes That Kill Machine Vision Projects
Lighting decides whether a vision project works, and it is chosen last in most projects. Six mistakes account for the majority of failures:...
Perception and Sensors
Encoder Resolution: Why 17 Bit Is the Floor
A 17-bit encoder divides one revolution into 131,072 counts. Behind a 100:1 gearbox that is 13.1 million counts per output revolution, or...
Perception and Sensors
Safety Laser Scanners: How Protective Fields Are Sized
Field length is calculated, not chosen. The minimum distance is the approach speed multiplied by the total system stopping time, plus an...
Perception and Sensors
Tactile Sensing: The Sense Robots Still Lack
Humans regulate grip force from tactile feedback within roughly 100 ms of a slip beginning, using around 17,000 mechanoreceptors per hand....