Development of a Robotic Framework for Experimental Sloshing Analysis

In the modern industrial packaging field, the use of robots provides high efficiency and precision, allowing to increase the speed of the operations. However, in the application of liquid manipulation this speed is opposed by the presence of the sloshing effect. In this thesis an experimental setup is developed to carry out tests of liquid manipulation finalized at the validation of two mathematical models describing the sloshing effect of a liquid in a cylindrical container. This setup includes an industrial robot, a vision system and the development of algorithms for the high-level control of the robot and for the monitoring of the free motion of the liquid surface . The control algorithms are designed to work with both a ROS or a ROS2 environment acting on a real robot or on a simulation. These algorithms focused on the generation and execution of end effector trajectories and joint trajectories. In this experimental setup the motion of the liquid is observed using two cameras. The image processing algorithm is developed in order to segment the liquid in the videos and to combine the information from both cameras in order to monitor the sloshing peak. These tests will contribute to the development of a sloshing-free motion technique in order to limit such effect during the manipulation of one or multiple containers.