A team of engineers from MIT and Princeton University has developed a robotic system that can successfully localize and pick up any item, amid clutter, and move it to another location. This technology earned them a first place spot at the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge.
The team’s “pick-and-place” system consists of a standard industrial robotic arm that the researchers outfitted with a custom gripper and suction cup.
They developed an “object-agnostic” grasping algorithm that enables the robot to assess a bin of random objects and determine the best way to grip or suction onto an item amid the clutter, without having to know anything about the object before picking it up.
Once it has successfully grasped an item, the robot lifts it out from the bin. A set of cameras then takes images of the object from various angles, and with the help of a new image-matching algorithm the robot can compare the images of the picked object with a library of other images to find the closest match. In this way, the robot identifies the object, then stows it away in a separate bin.
In general, the robot follows a “grasp-first-then-recognize” workflow, which turns out to be an effective sequence compared to other pick-and-place technologies.
This can be applied to warehouse sorting, but also may be used to pick things fro m your kitchen cabinet or clear debris after an accident.
News Source: http://news.mit.edu/2018/robo-picker-grasps-and-packs-0220
Related Videos
Soft Robotic Glove puts control in the grasp of hand-impaired patients
