Towards an Autonomous Unwrapping System for Intralogistics

Abstract

Warehouse logistics is a rapidly growing market for robots. However, one key procedure that has not received much attention is the unwrapping of pallets to prepare them for objects picking. In fact, to prevent the goods from falling and to protect them, pallets are normally wrapped in plastic when they enter the warehouse. Currently, unwrapping is mainly performed by human operators, due to the complexity of its planning and control phases. Autonomous solutions exist, but usually they are designed for specific situations, require a large footprint and are characterized by low flexibility. In this work, we propose a novel integrated robotic solution for autonomous plastic film removal relying on an impedance-controlled robot. The main contribution is twofold: on one side, a strategy to plan Cartesian impedance and trajectory to execute the cut without damaging the goods is discussed; on the other side, we present a cutting device that we designed for this purpose. The proposed solution presents the characteristics of high versatility and the need for a reduced footprint, due to the adopted technologies and the integration with a mobile base. Experimental results are shown to validate the proposed approach.

Autonomous Unwrapping of General Pallets: A Novel Robot for Logistics Exploiting Contact-Based Planning

“…Another example is the BW automatic unwrapper. 8 The unwrapper consists of a robotic arm of considerable size that melts the plastic with a hot air gun. No labels, tags, tapes, and the like are allowed in the cutting region.…”

“…We propose a novel strategy for unwrapping a large class of parcels using the platform that we first introduced in [8]. The robotic platform is composed of a camera to acquire the pallet information and of a robotic manipulator controlled via a Cartesian impedance law and equipped with a custom cutting end-effector.…”

“…In our previous work, [8], we tackled the problem of autonomous unwrapping for cuboid pallets. We introduced a novel platform composed of a mobile base with a small footprint and an impedance-controlled light-weight robotic manipulator endowed with a custom cutting end-effector, and we proposed a planning strategy validated with experiments.…”

“…In this way, uncertainties in the knowledge of the environment can be handled, and unexpected collisions detected and properly addressed. After integrating a force and torque sensor to the platform described in [8], we exploit online force and torque feedback into a reactive planning strategy. A picture of the proposed system and its main components is shown in Fig.…”

Enhancing Robot-Environment Physical Interaction via Optimal Impedance Profiles

“…Adaptive impedance control has been used to account for differences between model and manipulator parameters [15], [16]. In addition, the ability to adapt controller parameters may be used to improve system performance and has been proposed to optimize task efficiency [17], [18], [19].…”