RoboPainter -- a conceptual towards robotized interior finishes

High demand for painters is required nowadays and foreseen in the near future for both developed and developing countries. To satisfy such demand, this paper presents the detailed computer aided design (CAD) model of a fully functional wall painting robot for interior finishes. The RoboPainter is capable of performing full scale wall-ceil painting in addition to decorative wall drawings. The 8 degrees of freedom (DOF) mobile robot structure consists of a 6DOF spray painting arm mounted on a 2DOF differentially driven mobile base. The design presented endows several achievements in terms of total robot mass and painting rate as compared to existing literature. Detailed dynamic model parameters are presented to allow for further enhancement in terms of robot motion control.

Laser Powered Harvesting System for Table-Top Grown Strawberries

In this paper, a novel tool prototype for harvesting table-top grown strawberries is presented. With robustness against strawberry localization error of 15mm and average cycle time of 8.02 seconds at 50% of maximum operational velocity, it provides a promising contribution towards full automation of strawberry harvesting. In addition, the tool has an overall fruit-interacting width of 35mm that greatly enhances reach-ability due to the minimal footprint. A complete harvesting system is also proposed that can be readily mounted to a mobile platform for field tests. An experimental demonstration is performed to showcase the new methodology and derive relevant metrics.

AntGrip -- Boosting Parallel Plate Gripper Performance Inspired by the Internal Hairs of Ant Mandibles

Ants use their mandibles - effectively a two-finger gripper - for a wide range of grasping activities. Here we investigate whether mimicking the internal hairs found on ant mandibles can improve performance of a two-finger parallel plate robot gripper. With bin picking applications in mind, the gripper fingers are long and slim, with interchangeable soft gripping pads that can be hairy or hairless. A total of 2400 video-documented experiments have been conducted, comparing hairless to hairy pads with different hair patterns. Simply by adding hairs, the grasp success rate was increased by at least 29%, and the number of objects that remain securely gripped during manipulation more than doubled. This result not only advances the state of the art in grasping technology, but also provides novel insight into the mechanical role of mandible hairs in ant biology.