A new approach for transportation of objects within production systems by automated throwing and capturing is investigated. This paper presents an implementation, consisting of a throwing robot and a capturing robot. The throwing robot uses a linear and the capturing robot a rotary axis. The throwing robot is capable of throwing cylinder-shaped objects onto a target point with high precision. The capturing robot there smoothly grips the cylinders during flight by means of a rotational movement. In order to synchronize the capturing robot and the cylinder's pose and velocity, its trajectory has to be modeled as well as the motion sequences of both robots. The throwing and capturing tasks are performed by the robots automatically without the use of any external sensor system.

Throwing or shooting is a new approach for the transportation of objects within production systems. Since Gantry Robots are often applied to load and unload machines, in a research project a Cartesian Robot was used for capturing flying objects. A camera system is measuring the object's positions during a throw in subsequent periods of time. Based on these measurements it can predict the capturing point with an increasing accuracy. So it can direct the robot during a throw to the capturing point also with an increasing accuracy. In this paper control methods are proposed which allow in such an application fast and smooth motions of the robot to the final capturing point. For the evaluation of the control methods two scenarios, a simplified and a realistic one, are defined.

In a research project we are working at a new high performance technology for the transportation of objects within production systems. Objects shall be thrown or shot from one working station to another. Up to now only ballshaped objects were thrown, where no orientation had to be considered. At real objects in real production systems however it is important to retain the orientation of the objects during the transportation. In this paper it is presented how cylindershaped objects can be thrown accurate and with a stable orientation over distances of about 3 meters.