Gripper design and implementation for small parts sorting and assembling of a dual-arm industrial robot

• Main Author: Guo, Pengsheng
• Other Authors: Chen I-Ming
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/68713
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Collaborative robots have become a new trend in the robotics industry. It is shown that the collaboration between human and robot would improve the productivity for small or medium-sized manufacturers. Moreover, vision-enhanced robots have stood out compared to the old-style ones in accomplishing more flexible and diversified jobs in real-life working scenarios. This project aims to develop simulated industrial applications for a dual-arm collaborative robot, named Nextage, with visual enhancement by integrating Kinect device. The contributions of this report include a complete robot system design and a general guide for vision-enabled robot control algorithm. A system design comprises the mechanical structure of manipulators for both hands, electrical control of air suction, and simulated industrial working scenario. Moreover, the rationale behind the material selection and manufacturing method of gripper are also discussed. As for software development, essential packages required are proposed in order to communicate with Kinect device and robot in ROS environment. The report emphases the working principles for two core modules including object recognition and robot motion control. In order to achieve high accuracy of assembly process, the team has developed several calibration algorithms. At the end, states flow of two demos demonstrating result-based sorting based on color recognition and dual-arm cooperation based on contour recognition are illustrated. The implementation of this project hinges on connections between real-life industrial applications and novel vision-enhanced cooperation robot.