Development of an Autonomous Ball-Picking Robot

This paper presents the development of an autonomous ball picking robot successfully completed as a one-semester mechatronics senior design project. It aimed to increase the capability of a 6-Axis industrial robot available at school. This project development was performed to demonstrate an autonomous capability of the robot to deal with a dynamic operational environment. The system developed features visual processing on two cameras by an outside computer. One camera searches for objects randomly launched at the robot to determine the location and color, while, the other camera is used for digital feedback control of the gripper style end-effector. The development shows how outside sensors and processing can control a robot to grip and sort objects by color and location. Consequently, the completion of this project provided the project team of students with an invaluable learning experience for an industrial robot system development.