Robot Throwing Trajectory Planning for Solid Waste Handling

Recycling of solid waste becomes more and more important due to the environmental and ecological related issues. There are many studies about waste sorting and separation. Automated sorting and separation are also investigated. Robotic handling of solid waste is very promising due to its flexibility and high efficiency. To further improve robot efficiency for solid waste handling, robot throwing process is investigated. It is critical to plan robot motion such that solid waste can be thrown into designated places. However there is lack of a general method to plan a robot trajectory to deal with this issue. This paper proposes a general robot trajectory planning method considering robot constraints; meanwhile a minimization problem is investigated to minimize the robot cycle time. Simulations were performed to validate the proposed method. Compared to the traditional pick-and-place methods, the proposed method can reduce the robot cycle time significantly, which greatly improves the efficiency of solid waste handling and reduces robot energy consumption for handling given amount of solid waste.