Part alignment identification and adaptive pick-and-place operation for flat surfaces

Abstract

Industrial laser cutting machines use a type of support base that sometimes causes the cut metal parts to tilt or fall, which hinders the robot from picking the parts after cutting. The objective of this work is to calculate the 3D orientation of these metal parts with relation to the main metal sheet to successfully perform the subsequent robotic pick-and-place operation. For the perception part the system relies on the low cost 3D sensing Microsoft Kinect, which is responsible for mapping the environment. The previously known part positions are mapped in the new environment and then a plane fitting algorithm is applied to obtain its 3D orientation. The implemented algorithm is able to detect if the piece has fallen or not. If not, the algorithm calculates the orientation of each piece separately. This information is later used for the robot manipulator to perform the pick-and-place operation with the correct tool orientation. This makes it possible to automate a manufacturing process that is entirely human dependent nowadays. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.