Soft Food Robotic Pick and Place Operation with Embedded Control Structure

Robotic pick-and-place operation is planned for handling hard objects with on-off control gripper. It does not have force monitoring capability for safe grasping soft objects. Current force/torque sensor is too expensive and difficult to implement. Here, a low cost embedded control structure is designed with distributed FPGA robotic position control and gripper Arduino force control kernels. A model-free intelligent fuzzy sliding mode control strategy is employed to design the position controller of each robotic joint and gripper force controller. Experimental results show that the position and force tracking control errors of this robotic system are less than 1 mm and 0.1 N, respectively for pick-and-place different soft foods.