Development of Vision Based Smart Gripper for Material Handling Using Internet of Things

Abstract

Robotic grippers have becoming an emerging trend due to their boundless applications in industrial automation. Nowadays, the deployment of vision based smart gripper for material handling in industrial applications remains challenging and ongoing research. As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes more commercialized, the various concept of IoT have been integrated with the gripper due to efficient usage. Therefore, this project proposes the development of vision-based sensor of smart gripper for material handling in industrial applications that integrates with the IoT. The rationale of integrating IoT to vision based smart gripper is that it allows authenticated users to log in from any device, anywhere, and view video or images from vision based smart gripper in real-time for critical material handling. This system incorporates a vision sensor camera that acts as an “eye” to automatically detect and recognize the object with different weights and shapes and send the information to the robot for the next task. This smart gripper adopts a force sensor mounted into the fingertip to control the force applied when working with a wide range of objects with different weights. As for the electronic system, power module, communication and control module, sensor and actuator as well as user interface module have been adopted and integrated into the system. In the software development system, user interface configuration was developed through mobile application in which it communicates with Raspberry Pi B+ camera to serve as IoT platform. A series of experiments shows that the vision based gripper using IoT able to detect and recognize the objects 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.