Vision-Based Mobile Manipulator for Handling and Transportation of Supermarket Products

Abstract

Robot manipulators are growing more widely employed in the retail market, mostly for warehousing, but automating them in-store logistics processes is still a difficult task. Supermarkets and large retail stores face many challenges: shortages, handling, and placement of a single product on shelves. Various issues needed to be considered to develop a robot which can manipulate products of different sizes, shapes, and weight in limited spaces on shelves. The aim of this article is to design and develop a system to address the issues of shortage, identification, moving, and placements of products in supermarkets by properly incorporating database, camera vision, and line following mobile manipulator. A four-wheeled differential drive mobile robot was designed and developed which has a 5 DOF robotic manipulator on it. The line following technique is used to move it around the warehouse. The barcode recognition technique for the localization of product sections and object detection using SIFT is successfully and efficiently employed. The demonstration of the usefulness of the method was shown by carrying out experiments in a relevant environment which imitates a real supermarket.

Design and development of a delta robot system to classify objects using image processing

“…Automatic machines are gradually replacing manual steps in the production process to increase productivity and product quality. A robot is one of the automatic devices to replace humans in the production process [2], [3].…”

Development of Multi-Robotic Arm System for Sorting System Using Computer Vision

“…It can replace human labor in most jobs that can be characterized as repetitive or require a lot of lifting force. The robot can work continuously without fatigue, having high repeatability and reliability and creating high-precision and high-quality products [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Therefore, the requirements for flexibility, accuracy and robustness of robots are increasing to be able to operate in many different environments.…”