A Dual-Arm Robot for Collaborative Vision-Based Object Classification

Collaborative robots are an evolution of industrial robotics to enhance the safety of human operators to work side-by-side carrying out complex tasks which could not be done before. Adding vision to such a robot can make it smart in terms of detecting right workpieces while performing its tasks. This paper focuses on ABB YuMi ^© collaborative robot improvement with an external machine vision system to sort objects using both manipulators independently. Use of two arms to perform two pick and place tasks while using a single overhead camera system is presented in the paper. The work involves ABB RobotStudio for robot programming and National Instrument's LabVIEW for machine vision. Identifying different objects re-orienting them and organizing for pick and place, chosen as the example to demonstrate external machine vision integration with ABB dual-arm Yumi ^© robot.