Compliant end of arm tooling for a robot

摘要

A robot is used to pick parts from a bin. The robot has a compliant apparatus and one or more tools are connected to the apparatus to perform the picking. The compliant apparatus has mechanisms for monitoring and/or controlling its compliance. The compliant apparatus can have various embodiments. Force sensing can be used during removal of grasped parts from the bin to determine the force exerted on the picking tool(s). The signal indicative of the exerted force can be used by the robot controller to determine the weight of the parts that may be held by the picking tool(s). The robot has one or more devices which can be the picking tool to stir the parts in the bin.

主权项

1. A compliant apparatus for use by a robot for picking of randomly distributed objects, said apparatus comprising:
one or more rigid components in a predetermined arrangement with more than one compliant device, each of said more than one compliant devices providing compliance in one or more degrees of freedom to facilitate extraction of one or more of said objects from said bin, wherein each one of said more than one compliant devices can have different amounts of compliance along different axes to provide more compliance in one or more degrees of freedom than in others.