The platform: Automated Tire's SmartBay, which changes tires without taking the wheel off the vehicle — see it in The Robot Report's introduction video.
During a robotic tire change the tire is compressed and deforms, and the process needs to watch for small movements while that happens. A compressed rubber tire doesn't hold a fixed shape, so tracking its geometry with deterministic measurements alone is very difficult.
What I did
- Evaluated and selected new machine vision hardware for the project
- Developed a novel vision model that monitors subtle movements during the tire change process
- Took it from idea to a working ML prototype in a short period, with millimetre-scale sensitivity
Recommendation
“Tracking the geometry of a compressed rubber tire is very difficult to solve with deterministic measurements, and in a short period he demonstrated a working ML prototype with mm-scale sensitivity.” Michael Reilly, Senior Mechatronics Engineer, Automated Tire, Inc.