Automated Assembly of Seeding Toolbars at Vaderstad

其目标是使瓦德斯塔德工业公司(https://www.vaderstad.com/ca-en/).)生产的“播种工具”的装配自动化种子设定工具栏由称为控制节的小型模块化部分组成，这些部分一次组装在一起。首先，将两个控制部分从右和左组装到播种工具栏的中心核心。另外的控制部分被顺序地组装到这两个控制部分。目前，将控制部分移动到它们的预装配位置，以建立整个播种工具栏，是由操作员执行的。每个控制段在控制段装配线内建立后，被放在四个轮式液压千斤顶上，通过这些千斤顶，它们被引导到使用示教悬挂器的最终预装位置。然后，控制部分被螺栓固定到播种工具条的中心核心或已经装配到工具条中的其他控制部分。 Vaderstad对机械化和自动化他们的播种工具的组装过程非常感兴趣。这将通过在安装了控制部分的轮式液压千斤顶上添加伺服控制器作为运动单元来实现，并且在避免与静态(例如，装配线的部件、播种工具等)碰撞的同时，执行控制部分的自主运动规划和导航以达到其所需的姿势。和/或动态对象(例如，工作人员、架空龙门起重机的移动部件等)。研究目标是开发基于传感器的运动规划、控制和导航算法，以自动化将每个控制部分移动到其在播种工具条上的预装配配置的整个过程，因此不需要人工操作来导航和引导它们。这将通过使用通过安装在控制部分上的船上两个窄视场深度平移-倾斜-变焦(PTZ)摄像头以及制造车间头顶基础设施上固定位置的一个宽景摄像头获得的信息来实现。

The objective is to automate the assembly of the "seeding toolbar" manufactured at the Vaderstad Industries (https://www.vaderstad.com/ca-en/). The seeding toolbars consist of small and modular sections, called control sections, that are assembled together one at a time. First, two control sections are assembled to the central core of the seeding toolbar from right and left. Further control sections are sequentially assembled to these two control sections. Currently, moving the control sections to their pre-assembly positions, to build the entire seeding toolbar, is carried out by human operators. Each control section, after being built within the control-section assembly line, is put on four wheeled hydraulic jacks by which they are guided towards their final pre-assembly location using a teach pendant. The control sections are then bolted to either the central core of the seeding toolbar or other control sections already assembled into the toolbar. Vaderstad is keenly interested in mechanizing and automating the assembly process of their seeding toolbars. This will be achieved by adding servo controllers to the wheeled hydraulic jacks that the control sections are mounted on, as the locomotion unit, and conducting autonomous motion planning and navigation of control sections to their desired poses, while avoiding collision with static (e.g., parts of the assembly line, the seeding toolbar, etc.) and/or dynamic objects (e.g., work crew, moving parts of the overhead gantry cranes, etc.). The research objective is to develop sensor-based motion planning, control, and navigation algorithms to automate the entire process of moving each control section to its pre-assembly configuration on the seeding toolbars, therefore, no human operator would be needed to navigate and guide them. This will be achieved by using the information obtained via two narrow-field-of-depth Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras on board mounted onto the control sections and also one wide-view camera in a fixed position on the overhead infrastructure on the manufacturing floor.