Design and Implementation of a Real-Time System for Sorting andPick and Place of Objects Depending on Color and Geometry

Abstract

Pick and Place and sorting processes are tedious industrial processes that are usually carried out manually or semi-automatically, making them error-prone, time-consuming processes with varying productivity. Recently,there is a demand for many of these applications to become automated, including loading and unloading of CNC machines, assembly, and sorting.This paper presents an intelligent, developed and fully automated real-time system for pick and place parts based on the part’s geometry, as well as the sorting of these parts depending on their color property.The system consists of a 5 DOF articulated robotic arm and a conveyor; they controlled using an Arduino Mega microcontroller equipped with an IR sensor to control the movement of the belt.Also, a PC based digital camera used to perform image processing and work as feedback to the Arduino microcontroller. C++ and C# used as programming languages. The C++ used to program the microcontroller, whereas the C# used to analyze to acquired image with the help of the EmguCV library.The intelligent system has been tested to pick and place several parts with two different geometric shapes (cylindrical and cubic) and three different colors (red, green, and blue) from a conveyor to the discharge station.The developed system has proved successful performance at all stages of the work during the test.