Seam Following for Automated Industrial Fiber Mat Stitching

This paper presents a method for automatic seam following of two overlapping carbon fiber mats based on laser scans. We introduce a novel approach that combines one existing and two newly developed edge detection methods in a two out of three voting scheme to obtain high edge tracking robustness. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of a fully automated, sensor-guided robotic stitching process. The seam can be located within 1.0 mm at a detection rate of 99.3%.