Patent ID: 7221462
Filing Date: 2007-05-22
Classification: H03K

Abstract:
1. A method of determining the position of an article in a zone of a substrate comprising a plurality of zone portions, the method comprising: placing a plurality of photodetectors each presenting a reception lobe in or around the zone, the set of reception lobes covering all of said zone; structuring a neural network by supervised training; applying to the input of the structured neural network data that results from converting signals delivered by said plurality of photodetectors that are sensitive to illumination of said zone; and determining the position of the article in the zone as a function of at least one data item output by the structured neural network, by determining which of said zone portions has been touched or approached by the article forming an obstacle to the illumination of said zone; wherein the supervised training is performed by presenting the input of the neural network with several hundreds or thousands of sample vectors in succession, each sample vector comprising a plurality of sample data items resulting from converting signals delivered by said plurality of photodetectors and corresponding to a plurality of different illumination conditions of said zone, and in which the zone is illuminated by a plurality of light emitters each comprising an emission lobe, the set of emission lobes illuminating all of said zone.