Calibration and advanced control of the PICKABLE robot for the improvement of its dynamic performance

Pickable is a prototype, in the early stages of development, of an industrial CDPR developed by Tecnalia Research and Innovation within the "PicknPack" project, launched by the European Union to promote the development of flexible automated systems for the packaging of fresh or packaged food products. Current industrial solutions for pick and place applications are either delta parallel robots or serial arms SCARA robots but, in recent years, PKM based pick and place robots have begun to become more and more important in the pick and place market. The idea behind Pickable is to combine the principles of CDPR and PKM to build an alternative to the usual industrial manipulators that has workspace agility, a better footprint, and lower material cost. Pickable has some special elements compared to market standards; the CDPR itself with an industrial PC, cables, winches, and a platform integrating a pneumatic feeding system and two small motors to move the end-effector; and a vision system, consisting of a camera, a conveyor, an additional PC, and a graphical interface. Developed in collaboration with the LIRMM research laboratory, the aim of this Master Thesis was to carry on with the development of the machine in order to have all the components working and integrated with each other so it will then be possible to focus on the optimization and analysis of more specialized topics of interest. As a first step, the vision system was integrated with the manipulator, through the development of TCP/IP socket connections to allow the exchange of crucial information for operations and security. The second step involved the creation of a state machine to allow the management of the various functions, which was then also integrated with the GUI. The last step was the execution of tests to evaluate the preliminary dynamics performance of the machine and highlight the parameters that have the greatest influence.