Grasping the not-so-obvious: vision-based object handling for industrial applications

This article reports on several industrial applications of a visually guided system for robot grasping using an inexpensive two-finger gripper. In all cases, the robot uses visual information as input and is able to reason about the shapes of objects in a scene in order to decide the best stable grasp online. The first version of this system was able to grasp rectangular parts in arbitrary positions in the scene and was successfully deployed. New applications in industry have been addressed that must cope with the cost, time, and reliability requirements imposed by the industrial process. The results show that the capabilities of the underlying methodology make it feasible to deal with more complex shapes, even a priori unknown, opening up new possibilities within industrial domains, such as the food industry, that has traditionally not been fully automated due to a large variability in the shaper of the objects to be handled.