Optimal Trajectory Planning for a Robotic Manipulator Palletizing Tasks

Abstract

In recent years, the employment of robots has become a value-added entity in the industries in gaining their competitive advantages. Moreover, thanks to Industry 4.0 paradigm, many production tasks have grown in terms of dimensionality, complexity and higher precision and need to be performed by robots. Among them, the palletizing task is still highly dependent on the particular problem to solve, and its optimization needs to be performed basing on the ground condition. In this paper a palletizing task problem performed by a robotic manipulator is studied. More in detail, some objects have to be transported from a pre-determined storage area to a delivery area. In the storage area the objects are stacked one on the other in columns, while in the delivery area the robotic manipulator poses the objects in horizontal levels, one over another. The process is optimized by minimizing the total distance travelled by the robotic manipulator to transport all the objects from the storage area to the delivery area. An Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem is formalized and tested by simulations and experimental results.