An Intelligent Color Image Recognition and Mobile Control System for Robotic Arm

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop intelligent color recognition, mobile control, and monitoring system for a pick-and-place robotic arm for manufacturing systems. The demand for smart manufacturing factories with real-time control of fabricating processes and traceability of production information is increasing urgently. Generally speaking, a smart manufacturing facility is usually composed of sensing, computing, control, and communication technologies together. In this study, the three-tier architecture of the Internet of things (IoT) was adopted as a guideline to design mobile devices to control and monitor a color image recognition and alarm monitoring system by using Raspberry Pi and a web page database. The practical results and contributions of this study are as follows: With integrating the techniques of advanced B&R PLC, mobile devices and APP, color image recognition, Raspberry Pi microcomputer, and MySQL database technologies together, (1) the mobile control and monitoring system is able to supervise a real-time manufacturing plant anywhere and anytime with mobile devices easily; (2) the color identification system can identify and classify different color work-piece precisely, and the identification results are recorded for remote database platform; (3) the collected data are analyzed and displayed on mobile devices through the web database for field operators and engineers promptly. It provides a very successful practical paradigm to promote conventional factories to meet industry 4.0.