Motion Planning of an Innovative Serial Robot for Energy Consumption Reduction with "On Fly" Pieces Grasping

The following study deals with the on-line motion planning of an innovative SCARA like robot with unlimited joint rotations. The application field is the robotic interception of moving objects randomly distributed on a conveyor and detected by a vision system. A motion planning algorithm was developed in order to achieve a satisfactory cycle time and energy consumption. The algorithm is based on the evaluation of the inertial actions arisen in the robot structure during the pick and place motions and it aims to keep constant the rotation velocity of the first joint during the motion, the grasping and the discarding phases. Since the algorithm must be applied run time and the number of the reachable pieces can be high, a particular care was dedicated to the computational burden reduction. Subsequently to an analytic study of the kinematical constraints and the criteria definition for the choice of which piece to grasp, a devoted simulation software was developed. The software allows the control and the evaluation of the effects of all the main parameters on the system behavior and a comparison of the cycle time and the energy consumption between the proposed algorithm and a standard point-to-point motion strategy.