Master Thesis - Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg

3. Hard- and software Master Thesis Björn Ostermann page 29 of 126
To protect the robot from harming any other equipment, protective zones have been implemented in
the robot’s safety controller and in the configuration of the electronic safety trips.
The 3D camera is mounted to an arm that is flexible in its horizontal and vertical position. This allows
fixating the camera in a height between 4m and 5m. Because of the given workplace setup in this
project, where little demonstration can be done to the side and behind the robot, the camera was
mounted in front of the robot, to increase the covered working area in the frontal location. This has to
be noticed in the risk assessment of the project (chapter 6.3) since the camera does not cover parts of
the working range behind the robot.
If the position of the camera was changed, a new setup is needed, in which the camera is adjusted to
the robot (see chapter 5.5.2). For this adjustment three reference blocks are used, which are balls
covered in highly reflective material. The exact positions for the reference blocks have been
determined during the programming phase of the project. These positions have been marked on the
ground, so that the reference blocks themselves can be removed from the working area after the
adjustment is completed (see Figure 14).
Figure 14: Robot working place with reflective balls (red circles)
Later versions of this project can use an adjustment program as described in chapter 7.2.
3.4 MS Visual Studio
Visual Studio is an integrated development environment designed by Microsoft. It includes several
tools that help in programming, like IntelliSense – an autocompletion tool for symbol names – and a
form designer tool for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs – see Figure 15).