Autonomous Robotic System for Commission Tasks

The paper presents the development of an intelligent robot system for the autonomous picking of many thousands of different hard goods (cardboard boxes) and soft goods (textiles packed in transparent foils) out from unstructured heaps in commission tasks of catalogue sale companies. For task solution, a 6-axes industrial robot is employed, which can be equipped with various mechatronic grippers. A progressive sensor system comprising a high speed laser scanner, a force torque sensor in the robots wrist as well as tactile sensors in the gripper fingers allows to acquire thorough knowledge about the scene and to deal with critical situations such as mechanical deadlocks or object slipping out of the gripper. Collision free grasp planning is performed in a model of the robot cell. The robot system was installed and tested successfully using authentic objects in the shipping department of a famous German catalogue sales company.