Visual servo based automation of an articulating robot work cell for part handling

Abstract EN

Industrial robots are often used for part sorting and assembly operations in work cells but a small change in the geometrical or spatial information of the objects may necessitate a new program for the robot to perform the operation adequately.

To cope with this limitation of robots, vision based servoing can prove very effective.

In this paper, a low cost and very efficient prototype visual servoing system is presented in which an articulating robot has been used with off-the-shelf imaging and computer hardware.

A camera, mounted above the gripper of the robot, provides images of the scene and through image processing the features of the object to be manipulated are extracted in real time and sent to the robot controller.

Robot controller moves the robot gripper accordingly and objects of different geometries, placed randomly on the conveyor belt, can be handled.

Results show near 100 % efficiency for test parts, placed at least 1.5cm apart, while the speed of operation has been found better than conventional sensor and switch based automation of such a system.