Generic Development of Bin Pick-and-Place System Based on Robot Operating System

Bin pick-and-place is an important topic in factory automation and warehouse automation. In this paper, a bin pick-and-place system based on robot operating system (ROS) is implemented to make a six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) robot manipulator to complete multiple pick-and-place tasks. The proposed system uses ROS to integrate an object perception module and a pick-and-place module, where the former uses an RGB-D camera to capture images inside the bin, and the latter controls a 6-DOF robot manipulator and two self-made vacuum tools. To estimate the pose of the target object, a YOLOv4 object detector is implemented, and an object sorting method is proposed to find the target object in the image. Then, a pose estimation method based on computer aided design (CAD) is proposed to estimate the pose of target object. To perform the object pick-and-place operations, a coordinate transformation node is designed to transfer the pose of the target object into the workspace. Then, a link distance-based bin collision avoidance method is proposed to avoid collisions. Finally, the angle of the 1-DOF vacuum tool and the picking and placement poses of the robot manipulator are obtained from the result of the bin collision avoidance and the pose of the target object. In this study, a total of ten ROS nodes are designed, and the solutions that make each function easier to implement and reproduce are proposed. In the experiments, we set up four experiments with two task types and two object types to verify the effectiveness of the implemented bin pick-and-place system.