Automated 3-degree-of-freedom pose path planning for a button weight robot motion

In modern intelligent manufacturing, it is the most important task for mobile robot to transfer automatically the button weight in the surrounding environment, which has a special shape and surface conditions. In this paper, a button weight handling robot, integrated with a laser scanner and 3-dregree of freedom of arm, was first presented to automatically transfer balance weight without human operation. A fast spatial positioning method was developed to control step by step robot arm to grab the critical area of button wright. Moreover, an automatic controlling algorithm was designed to plan the moving trajectory in 3D virtual environment. Finally, a series of experiments on typical button weights were carried out to demonstrate this automated controlling technique. 3-degree of freedom pose positioning for typical profile of button weight was also discussed. Those results have been proven to be amenable for practical purposes through many tests so that it might be applicable to achieve intelligent grabbing of different weights.