Mobile manipulation for autonomous packaging in realistic environments: EuRoC challenge 2, stage II, showcase

European Robotics Challenges (EuRoC) project has been launched to find competitive solutions by exploiting synergies across research institutes to industrial end-users. This paper reports the research conducted by the TIMAIRIS team to fulfill EuRoC C2 Stage II tasks. TIMAIRIS is one of the 6 EuRoC finalists (Stage III) from an initial group of 102 teams. The packaging industry is very interested in recent advances in robotics but is still quite conservative in the way it uses automation, since shapes and printed patterns of blanks vary a lot to comply with end users' demands. The use of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) is widely common but the use of more sophisticated decision mechanisms is not so common. A shop floor logistics and manipulation system has been developed and demonstrated in a realistic environment for autonomous packaging.