Case studies / Customer project
Bin picking oily steel parts from mixed boxes
BENTELER Automotive picks oily, shiny steel parts for axle systems from boxes that arrive unsorted. At its test centre in Paderborn, the light-field solution from HD Vision Systems detected the parts reliably and kept the ABB robot supplied with collision-free grasp paths.
Tested at the BENTELER test centre in Paderborn, 2021
The task
BENTELER Automotive often has to pick oily steel components, for example for axle systems. The vision system has to handle their gloss reliably.
The boxes arrive unsorted, and the uneven floor of the load carriers makes it hard to tell part from box. Even so, the right parts have to be detected, gripped correctly and placed in an oriented way.
The solution
A LumiScanX light-field sensor directly on the robot arm captures the box. The software detects the metallic components and their orientation in the point cloud and plans collision-free paths.
The grasp paths go directly to the ABB robot controller via a predefined interface. The system works passively: it continuously supplies the controller with possible paths and objects to pick and uses the robot’s own gripping routine, which avoids standstills in the picking process.
The result
Even hard-to-see shiny parts in mixed boxes were detected and picked.
BENTELER particularly highlighted how fast the sensor and software supplied the robot with grasp paths.
“We are highly satisfied with HD Vision Systems’ solution for bin picking in our difficult conditions. For example, even hard-to-see shiny objects in boxes that are not sorted by type are detected with the automated grip. In particular, the speed with which the sensor and software have provided the robot with gripping paths is impressive.”