A Novel Passive Grasping Robot Control Framework Towards Vision-Based Industrial Steel Bar Conveyor Removal

Material handling using robotic automation is critical for enabling efficient and safe environments for numerous industries. In the steel bar manufacturing industry bars of shorter length are occasionally produced that do not match the required batch length. Currently human operators visually classify and manually remove the short bar from a batch of rods moving on a conveyor. This can present a manual handling health and safety risk. This paper demonstrates the output of a feasibility study investigating this problem; resulting in a novel, passive grasping robotic control framework that: (a) emulates the human operator's technique; and (b) successfully removes multiple bar types from a moving conveyor using closed-loop visual control