Some industrial parts feeders, such as bowl feeders and the Sony APOS
system, utilize vibratory dynamics to help orient parts. For instance,
a vibrating pallet of holes can be used to capture parts in a
desired orientation by using an appropriate shaking motion.
Our work on parts feeding has focused on feeding parts on a conveyor
belt using a system that is very simple, yet still programmable to
allow feeding different types of parts. We have shown that a one
joint revolute robot, operating above a fixed-speed conveyor belt, can
position and orient any polygonal part. We call the system
1JOC (1
Joint Over Conveyor). The power of the system comes from its
"understanding" of stable pushing mechanics. The 2JOC is a variant
of the 1JOC that can orient 3D parts by knocking them over (toppling).
References to relevant papers are given below.
-
K. M. Lynch.
Inexpensive conveyor-based parts feeding.
Assembly Automation Journal, 19(3):209-215, 1999.
abstract,
postscript (601 K),
pdf (64 K)
-
K. M. Lynch.
Toppling manipulation.
1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation,
Detroit, MI, April 1999.
abstract,
postscript (624 K),
pdf (81 K)
Tom A. Scharfeld and Kevin M. Lynch
The 2JOC (2 joints over conveyor) uses just two controlled degrees-of-freedom
to do full 3D parts orienting of parts on a fixed-speed conveyor. It does
this by using pushing to orient parts in the conveyor plane, and toppling
(or rolling) to accomplish out-of-plane rotations. The video shows the
end of an automatically planned and executed sequence of rolls ("topples")
and pushes ("turns"). This video is sped up by 150%.
AVI, 3741K
