Automated throwing and capturing of cylinder-shaped objects

Abstract

A new approach for transportation of objects within production systems by automated throwing and capturing is investigated. This paper presents an implementation, consisting of a throwing robot and a capturing robot. The throwing robot uses a linear and the capturing robot a rotary axis. The throwing robot is capable of throwing cylinder-shaped objects onto a target point with high precision. The capturing robot there smoothly grips the cylinders during flight by means of a rotational movement. In order to synchronize the capturing robot and the cylinder's pose and velocity, its trajectory has to be modeled as well as the motion sequences of both robots. The throwing and capturing tasks are performed by the robots automatically without the use of any external sensor system. © 2012 IEEE.