Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice

From grading and preparing harvested vegetables to the tactile probing of a patient’s innermost recesses, mechatronics has become part of our way of life. The addition of senses and computing intelligence to blend with mechanical actuation gives rise to a breed of new machines with all the best attributes of a robot. Here we find educational robots competing under water and dancing on land. Surgical robots drill precision holes in the skull while others direct radiation treatment or extract blood from an umbilical cord. Machine vision manages beer kegs and automated paint spraying, while controlling feral animals and the watering of cotton crops. Although there is no shortage of theoretical and technical detail in these chapters, they have the common theme that they describe work that has been applied in practice. They are vital reading both for students of mechatronics and for engineers harnessing its power to create new products.

Table of Contents:
Education.- Emergent Behaviour Real-time Programming of a Six-Legged Omni-Directional Mobile Robot Planning of Viennese Waltz Behaviour.- The Hong Kong Underwater Robot Challenge.- Dynamics and Control of a VTOL Quad-Thrust Aerial Robot.- Project-oriented Low Cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle with Servo-visual Control for Mechatronics Curricula.- Coordination in Mechatronic Engineering Work.- Vision Techniques.- A Vision System for Depth Perception that Uses Inertial Sensing and Motion Parallax.- Rate Shape Identification Based on Particle Swarm Optimization.- Advanced 3D Imaging Technology for Autonomous Manufacturing Systems.- Vision Based Person Tracking and Following in Unstructured Environments.- Simple, Robust and Accurate Head-Pose Tracking Using a Single Camera.- Vision Applications.- Machine Vision for Beer Keg Asset Management.- Millimetre Wave Radar Visualisation System: Practical Approach to Transforming Mining Operations.- An Underwater Camera and Instrumentation System for Monitoring the Undersea Environment.- Visual Position Estimation for Automatic Landing of a Tail-Sitter Vertical Takeoff and Landing Unmanned Air Vehicle.- Minutiae-based Fingerprint Alignment Using Phase Correlation.- Robotic Techniques.- A Snake-like Robot for Inspection Tasks.- Modelling Pneumatic Muscles as Hydraulic Muscles for Use as an Underwater Actuator.- Automated Tactile Sensory Perception of Contact Using the Distributive Approach.- Blind Search Inverse Kinematics for Controlling All Types of Serial-link Robot Arms.- Medical Applications.- Distributive Tactile Sensing Applied to Discriminate Contact and Motion of a Flexible Digit in Invasive Clinical Environments.- Intelligent Approach to Cordblood Collection.- An Autonomous Surgical Robot Applied in Practice.- Development of an Intelligent Physiotherapy System.- Visual Prostheses for the Blind: A Framework for Information Presentation.- Computer-based Method of Determining the Path of a HIFU Beam Through Tissue Layers from Medical Images to Improve Cancer Treatment.- Agricultural Applications.- On-the-go Machine Vision Sensing of Cotton Plant Geometric Parameters: First Results.- Robotics for Agricultural Systems.- More Machine Vision Applications in the NCEA.