Development of a Robotic Part Fixture Mechanism for PNP Operation in an Industrial Scenario

Abstract

This paper deals with the design, fabrication and implementation of an efficient method of part-feeding mechanism (work-space fixture) for a stationary 2-DOF cylindrical coordinate robot. The aim was to design, fabricate each part of the unit with indigenous components and construct a prototype of an part- feeding mechanism such as a conveyer belt for a robotic system to pick up parts from one place and keep it at another place, say in a container. This is achieved by means of a robot which is used in conjunction with the conveyor belt mechanism for performing an assembly operation, say, a PNP operation and interacting with each other and control it with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) software written in Visual Basic (VB) language while performing an assembly operation avoiding all the obstacles in its path of motion from the source to the destination. The objective of this work was to build a low cost part-feeding mechanism to the robot that could perform simple industrial manipulation tasks like picking up of manufactured components from conveyer belt and placing in a bin or a container. The simulation, design, fabrication and implementation of the work is divided into different stages, viz., Design and fabrication of the mechanical hardware of the robotic system, Design of the electrical / electronic hardware for the robot system, Development of the control software and various algorithms by developing a user friendly GUI using Visual Basic language in order to control the entire designed and fabricated robotic system, Integration of all the above three stages to perform an application such as grasping of objects which are arriving on a conveyor belt and placing in an container such as a bin and repeating the same task again and again.