STUDIES ON ROBOTIC MANIPURATOR-GRIPPER FOR YOUNG PLANT HANDLING

本研究的目的是为苗木生产系统中的组织培养等生物技术操作开发一个机器人系统。在无菌生物洁净室进行组织培养操作时，处理组织和愈伤组织是很重要的。为了在没有人工操作的情况下完成这些工作，我们开发并测试了一种利用机器人进行继代培养的愈伤组织处理系统。它能够轻轻地捡起一小块正在繁殖的愈伤组织，这些愈伤组织在体外是脆弱的。机械手把它夹在手指之间，自动地放入一种新的培养基中。这里使用的机械手是三菱公司的“Move Master 2”多关节小型工业机器人。该系统由机械手-夹持器系统、图像处理系统和计算机控制系统组成。采用16位个人计算机对洁净工作台的机械手-夹持器系统和图像处理系统进行实时控制。利用单色电视摄像机获取愈伤组织的图像数据。在CRT显示器中，一个图像帧有64000（h320x200）个像素，每个像素数据有16个亮度级别（4位数据）。利用图像数据计算二维图像中愈伤组织的大小和质心。用应变计传感器测量抓握愈伤组织时的手指力，并通过计算机通过传感器反馈将其恒定控制在10 g的水平。然后，机器人通过电视摄像机获取一个愈伤组织的图像数据，计算一些图像参数，控制机械手和抓取器，将其捡起并放入培养皿，总共需要20秒左右的时间。

The aim of this study is to develop a robotic system for biotechnological operations such as tissue culture works in the seedling production system. It is important to handle tisssue and callus on tissue culture operations in bioclean rooms with germfree. To carry out these works without manual operations, a callus handling system for subculture with robotics was developped and tested. It was able to softly pick up a small piece of propagating callus thich was delicate and vulnerable in vitro. The robotic manipulator had held it between his fingers and put into a new culture medium automatically. The manipulator used here was Mitsubishi's "Move Master 2" multi-joint small industrial robot.The system consisted of the manipulator-gripper system, the image processing system and the computer control system. Both the manipulator-gripper system and the image processing system in a clean bench were controlled by the 16bit personal computer in real time. The monochromatic TV camera was used to get image data of callus. An image frame had 64000(H320xV200) pixels and each pixel data had sixteen brighness levels(4 bits data) in a CRT display. The size and centroid of callus in two dimensional image was caluculated from image data.A finger force in gripping callus was measured with strain gage sensors and was constantlly controlled of 10 g in level with the sensor foodback by a computer. Then, it took about 20 seconds in total for the robot to get image data of one callus with TV camera, to caluculate some image parameters, to control the minipulator and gripper, to pick it up and to put into a Petri dish.