Automated Robot System for Leather Finishing Process.

摘要

To establish highly automated leather finishing process, it is necessary to develop the leather handling robot system which are provided with automatic aligned stacking and feeding functions of side-leather for loading and unloading to leather finishing machines. The robot system are composed of manipulation hand with vacuum pad and image processing system to recognize the shape patterns of side-leather for aligning functions. For the image processing, 2 types of sensors are applied. They are CCD camera for the recognition of shape patterns and other one is luster sensor to detect grain or flesh side. By applying the developed shape patterns recognition algorithms to the image processing system, side-leather discriminations of grain or flesh, head or tail, belly or back were carried out perfectly. As the result, the handling robot aligned side-leathers with following 2 stacking methods.1) Stacking with left and right side along the backbone (LR method).2) Stacking with grain to grain (GG method).Also, investigated on the robot hand to hold correctly each 1 leaf from stacked up side-leathers on the table.