Dual-robot Cooperative Sorting System with Multiple Sensors

With the rapid development of industrial robots, their applications become more and more complex. The requirements for robots are no longer just simple repetitive movements, but some intelligent coordination. A single robot is difficult to complete such a task. Hence a coordinated robotic system with dual robots should be developed. In this paper, we propose a dual-robot cooperative system with multiple sensors to perform high speed material sorting. A vision system is used to locate the objects on a conveyor and classify the objects. Based on the information from the vision system, the first robot will pick up the object and transfer it to an intermediate station. The second robot will then sort the object into different containers. The two robots are controlled to avoid collision with each other. An experimental system is set up and experiments were performed to sort different objects into different containers. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed method has many applications in manufacturing automation.