Development of Sweeping Mechanism in Auto-Sort System for Small Home Appliances on the Ground

Resource consumption is on the rise due to the increase in the world's population and the improvement of the quality of life. In addition, the value of resources is increasing as natural resources peak out. It is expected that the competition for resources between countries will intensify in the future. In order to form a society that does not depend on natural resources, the world has begun to build a circular economy. This is a concept of actively reusing resources and reducing the consumption of natural resources. In Japan, urban mines that use discarded industrial products as mines have attracted attention. However, the domestic recycling rate of scrap metal is on the decline. Despite the need for manual sorting, the profits gained from recycling scrap metal are small. Unprofitable scrap such as home appliances are exported overseas where labor costs are low. In order to reduce recycling costs, we have been developing a system that automatically classifies scrap. This automatic system requires an autonomous driving function, an environment recognition function, a home appliance sorting function, and a home appliance pick-up function. The home appliance pick-up function requires the home appliance pick-up function by a grapple and the function to sweep small items that could not be collected by the grapple on the ground. In this study, we propose a mechanism that can sweep small objects, and report on our prototype and verification experiments.