STTR Phase I: Versatile Robot Hands for Warehouse Automation

从仓储和物流市场的规模可以清楚地看出该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力。美国劳工统计局估计，每年在仓库中手工搬运库存的成本为 50 亿美元。业界渴望采用新的机器人技术，并且它已经在这个问题的许多方面产生了重大影响，加快了出货速度并降低了成本。然而，当物体范围很大时，处理单个物体尚未被证明是可行的。本项目开发的抓取机器人将满足这一需求，并降低制造商、经销商和客户的物流成本。此外，能够自动抓取各种物体的机器人抓取系统的创建将为其他行业的工人带来机器人技术的好处。这对于让机器人进入小型制造车间至关重要，并将显着提高用于军事、救援和老年人家庭援助等消费者应用的远程呈现系统的性能。这个小型企业技术转移研究 (STTR) 第一阶段项目基于大学十年来关于使用被动机制进行抓取的机器人设计和构建的研究。通过精心调整手指的结构顺应性，机器人手可以设计为补偿所抓取物体的尺寸、形状和位置的变化，以获得可靠的抓取。在该项目的过程中，将开发出一种商业产品，能够以极低的错误率拾取和放置各种物品，这迄今为止一直被认为是传感和规划中的难题。新型合规夹具结合低成本触觉传感和简化抓取规划方面的突破，将实现满足实际客户需求的性能水平。新的拣选机器人将根据从模拟仓库环境中的箱子中拣选的一组真实物品进行验证。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is clear from the size of the market in warehousing and logistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the annual cost of moving inventory by hand in warehouses is 5 billion dollars. Industry is eager to adopt new robotic technology, and it has already made a significant impact in many aspects of this problem, speeding shipments and lowering costs. However, handling individual items has not yet proven viable when the range of objects is large. The grasping robot developed in this project will meet this need, and reduce the cost of logistics for manufacturers, distributors, and customers. Additionally, the creation of robot grasping systems that can automatically grasp a wide range of objects will open up the benefits of robotic technology to workers in other industries. This is critical to making robots accessible to small manufacturing shops, and will significantly improve the performance of telepresence systems used for military, rescue, and consumer applications such as home assistance for the elderly.This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project is based on a decade of university research on the design and construction of robots for grasping using passive mechanisms. Through the carefully tuned structural compliance of the fingers, robot hands can be designed to compensate for variation in the size, shape and location of grasped objects to obtain reliable grasps. During the course of this project, a commercial product will be developed capable of picking and placing a wide range of items at extremely low error rates, something that has hitherto been considered a hard problem in sensing and planning. The new compliant grippers, combined with breakthroughs in low-cost tactile sensing and simplified grasp planning, will enable a level of performance that meets the needs of real-world customers. The new picking robot will be validated against a set of realistic items picked from bins in a simulated warehouse environment.