But do you need AI? How about this for a screw-in-hole machine:
Assuming the hole is in the Z plane: Camera in the X plane, observes the screw against a high contrast background. Camera in the Y plane, observes the screw against a high contrast background. The motors need not know their exact position, just be of controllable speed. As the screw gets close to alignment the speed on the motor is stepped down, it stops when it's aligned. When both cameras report that it's in position a motor in the Z plane pushes the screw towards the hole, stopping when a plunger next to the screw reports the correct depth.
If you have to be concerned with the Z axis alignment you make the X and Y backgrounds striped, the alignment of the screw is measured compared to those stripes and it's rotated accordingly.
This is how a human would handle it--we do not have anything like the motor precision to get the screw in the hole directly, but we can use our eyes to refine it without *needing* the motor precision. Reliably identifying the screw from the background is hard but this approach doesn't require *identifying* anything. You're just mapping the bounding box of the object of a very different color.
If you have a large movement field and a high precision requirement you might need two cameras, the second with a much narrower field of view.
Assuming the hole is in the Z plane: Camera in the X plane, observes the screw against a high contrast background. Camera in the Y plane, observes the screw against a high contrast background. The motors need not know their exact position, just be of controllable speed. As the screw gets close to alignment the speed on the motor is stepped down, it stops when it's aligned. When both cameras report that it's in position a motor in the Z plane pushes the screw towards the hole, stopping when a plunger next to the screw reports the correct depth.
If you have to be concerned with the Z axis alignment you make the X and Y backgrounds striped, the alignment of the screw is measured compared to those stripes and it's rotated accordingly.
This is how a human would handle it--we do not have anything like the motor precision to get the screw in the hole directly, but we can use our eyes to refine it without *needing* the motor precision. Reliably identifying the screw from the background is hard but this approach doesn't require *identifying* anything. You're just mapping the bounding box of the object of a very different color.
If you have a large movement field and a high precision requirement you might need two cameras, the second with a much narrower field of view.