STTR Phase I: Versatile Robot Hands for Warehouse Automation

从仓储和物流市场的规模来看，这个项目的广泛影响/商业潜力是显而易见的。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。行业渴望采用新的机器人技术，它已经在这个问题的许多方面产生了重大影响，加快了发货速度，降低了成本。然而，当对象范围很大时，处理单个项目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，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使其他行业的工人受益于机器人技术。这对于使小型制造车间能够访问机器人至关重要，并将显著提高用于军事、救援和消费应用的远程呈现系统的性能，例如老年人的家庭辅助。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对使用被动机制进行抓取的机器人的设计和建造的研究。通过仔细调整手指的结构柔顺性，可以设计机器人手来补偿被抓取物体的大小、形状和位置的变化，以获得可靠的抓取。在这个项目的过程中，将开发一种商业产品，能够以极低的错误率拾取和放置各种物品，这是迄今为止被认为是传感和规划方面的一个难题。新的合规抓取器与低成本触觉传感和简化抓取规划方面的突破相结合，将使性能达到满足现实客户需求的水平。新的拣选机器人将在模拟仓库环境中与一组从垃圾箱中挑选的逼真物品进行验证。

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.