Development of vision-based sensor of smart gripper for industrial applications

Abstract

In recent years, robotic gripper is widely used for different tasks in various fields. Grippers operate with industrial robots for handling and manipulation of objects. Grippers also operate with hard automation for assembling; micro assembling, machining and packaging. This paper aims to develop vision-based sensor of smart gripper which integrates together with its robotic arm for industrial applications. This system incorporates a camera by means vision sensor to automatically detect and recognize the object that having different weight and shapes and send the information to the robot for next task. Gripper with two fingers has been proposed. This finger is designed to move in translational mode where one finger moves and the other is fixed. This smart gripper adopts force sensor that mounted into the finger tip in order to control the force applied when working with wide range of objects that having different weight without crushed or damaged it. Four servo motors are used to drive the four degree of freedom (D. O. F) of a robotic arm. Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller (BS2) is used as a controller unit to control the position and the movement of the smart gripper. A series of experiment shows that the proposed system is able to detect and recognize the object and then send the information/command directly to the robot to execute grasping and lifting phase of the object to the desired location that has been assigned.