Designing a framework to give perception capabilities to an industrial robot for waste separation tasks

摘要

The main purpose of this research is to make a first approach to analyze the waste preclassification task of plastic bottles in Bogota ,that occurs at the Centro de recoleccion La Alqueria one of the few collection centers that are part of the Unidad Administrativa Especial De Servicios Publicos (UASP) and propose its automation in an emulated human-robot co-existence workstation. The process is simulated at the Centro Tecnologico de Automatizacion Industrial (CTAI) from PUJ. The testbed consists on an emulated pre-classification workstation where three types of thermoplastic recyclable materials, are classified and their 3D pose estimation is obtained using the IR (infrared) depth sensor of the Microsoft kinect. Additionally, the SDA10F dual-arm Motoman robot equipped with a Robotiq gripper is used to perform the picking and place task, carrying the bottles to the appropriate bin. To distribute the designed system two laptops are used; one in charge of running the image processing algorithm, and another one in charge of the environment simulation and of the control of the robot.