Trajectory-based fast ball detection and tracking for an autonomous industrial robot system

Abstract

Autonomising industrial robots is the main goal in this paper; imagine humanoid robots that have several degrees of freedom (DOF) mechanisms as their arms. What if the humanoid's arms could be programmed to be responsive to their surrounding environment, without any hard-coding assigned? This paper presents the idea of an autonomous system, where the system observes the surrounding environment and takes action on its observation. The application here is that of rebuffing an object that is thrown towards a robotic arm's workspace. This application mimics the idea of high dynamic responsiveness of a robot's arm. This paper will present a trajectory generation framework for rebuffing incoming flying objects. The framework bases its assumptions on inputs acquired through image processing and object detection. After extensive testing, it can be said that the proposed framework managed to fulfil the real-time system requirements for this application, with an 80% successful rebuffing rate.