Packing Planning and Execution Considering Arrangement Rules

Abstract

To send a consumer the ordered products in e-commerce, it is necessary to pack the products into a container. When packing, we need to consider the arrangement of the products to avoid damaging them during transportation by using the know-how of packing. In this paper, we propose a packing robot system that plans the arrangement and then executes it. To develop this robot system, we employ two ideas. The first idea is to split the whole process into the arrangement of the objects and robot motion generation. The arrangement is regarded as a 3D bin-packing problem. The second idea is to use the heuristics of the packing so that objects are stacked from the bottom. Since the space above the target position is free from collisions, the strategy to approach from the top reduces the possibility of a collision. In the experiments, we succeeded in arranging eleven objects satisfying the assigned rules and packing ten of the eleven objects using the robot.