Industrial Part Tossing Looks Like Fun, Has Questionable Practicality

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 29 of September , 2009 at 1:53 am

High speed robotic hands like those crazy ones we posted about in July are extremely awesome, and I’d be the first to argue that they don’t really need to be practical. Not yet, anyway. But a group from Reinhold-W├╝rth University in K├╝nzelsau (the capital of the Hohenlohe district in Germany, in case you were wondering) is trying to revolutionize automated industrial manufacturing by using high speed robot hands to throw and catch parts that would otherwise have to be transported around a factory by a conveyor belt or some other inefficient means.

There are two ways to go about throwing and catching of things, as anyone who has ever played baseball can attest to: you either need someone to throw perfectly, or you need someone to catch adaptively. Most baseball teams (with some exceptions that I won’t belabor) do their best to combine good throwing with good catching. This is inefficient, however, since you can just as effectively make due with a thrower that can reliably hit the broad side of a barn as long as you have a catcher that can cover the entirety of said barn. And that’s the idea behind this robotic system: it’s very good at catching, meaning that you don’t need a super accurate robotic throwing system. All the catching system uses is a single stationary camera (in contrast to these hands, which use at least two tracking cameras), and it can catch tennis balls with no problem. Here it is in slow motion; watch the system making small adjustments right before the catch:

As cool as this is, I have to wonder if the benefits of this type of system would really be worth the costs at this point. Conveyors are cheap and reliable, and robots are scarily good at working with objects on conveyors. In a few years time, though, my guess is that it will start making sense to utilize the potential of high speed robotics… It’s just going to take a little more development as well as a bit of a mental shift for us humans. What I mean is, at this point, industrial robotics are already much faster and more efficient than humans, but not inhumanly so (with a few exceptions). Throwing parts around a factory, however, is something totally different. You think about it, and it seems utterly crazy, and it is crazy, just not for robots. So much of robotics revolves around making robots do things in a more human-like manner, and I’m excited for the day that robotics in general, but industrial robotics specifically, takes full advantage of the potential of non-human systems.

VIA [ Plastic Pals ]

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Category: Industrial, Research

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