Robot Guidance: Picking Car Parts from a Crate

This sample application touches many industrial areas. It shows once again how the flexible combination of seemingly simple building blocks in a general-purpose system can solve many problems often thought to require specialized single-purpose machines.

The image shows a (mostly empty) crate with car parts. The objective is to transmit the position of the last part present to a robot so that the robot can take the part out of the crate. The last part in this case is defined by the Western way of reading: row-wise from left to right.

The solution with NeuroCheck is very simple. The position of the crate before the camera is quite stable making it possible to place a region of interest over each row of possible part positions. Then all bright objects of the required size are searched. Making use of NeuroCheck's group concept and the flexible parameter settings of the sort functions these rows of objects are sorted individually in such a way that only the object with the highest x-coordinate is left. The remaining objects are again sorted - globally this time - leaving only the object with the highest y-coordinate. This has to be the required last part. Its coordinates can now be transmitted via serial interface to the robot controller.