The concept of dynamic tracking line is proposed as the feasible tracking region for a robot in a robot-conveyor system, which takes the variable conveyor speed into consideration. This paper presents an effective method to find the dynamic tracking line in a robotic workcell. The maximum permissible line-speed which is a quantitative measure of the robot capability for conveyor tracking, is defined on the basis of the relation between the end-effector speed and the bounds on the joint velocities, accelerations, and torques. This measure is derived in an analytic form, and some of its properties are established mathematically. The problem of finding the dynamic tracking line is then formulated as a root-solving problem for a single-variable equation, and solved by the use of a simple numerical technique.

A class of nonlinear digital filters, called the threshold Boolean filter (TBF), is introduced. The TBF is defined by a Boolean function on the binary domain and is a natural extension of stack filters. In this paper, the TBF is further extended to a larger class of filters, called the extended TBF (ETBF), which encompasses linear FIR and linear combination of order statistic (LOS) filters as well as the TBF. The optimal design of the TBF and ETBF under the mean square error (MSE) criterion is investigated. It is shown that the optimization of the TBF can be formulated as a quadratic zero-one programming, and that the optimization of the ETBF as a classical quadratic problem. Thus, linear FIR and median-type nonlinear filters can be analyzed and designed in a unified framework of the ETBF. The ETBF has been applied to enhance noisy images. The results show that the ETBF outperforms the TBF and the FIR Wiener filter.>