Mechatronic design and interface for item picking robot

Abstract

In the recent years, the E-Commerce industry has growing rapidly fast. The E-Commerce companies have a challenge to compete with each other to prepare and deliver their order faster in the competitive market. Additionally, companies should keep the price low by reducing any unessential cost. One of the possible solution is to reduce the cost by cutting manpower in the warehouse. Automation by robots is required in order to replace manpower while increasing efficiency of the process done in the warehouse. Amazon has used the automated shelves system inside their warehouse to automate moving, keeping, and delivering items in the buying order to the workers so the workers can manage the items manually. To fully automate the warehouse, the automated system for managing items, picking and stowing from and to the shelves is required. In this case, such system has not available yet in the market due to complexity in the required technology to do that. This project will focus on development of the mentioned system and bring it to the market. The focus in this report is developing the gripper hardware of such system to grasping the various items in the warehouse. Because there are so many varieties of shape and material of the items in the warehouse, the development of versatile gripper which can grasp any item is needed. For the design, the author will develop a new idea to make a combination of mechanical jaw gripper and vacuum gripper into one hardware and use it for the picking and stowing challenge.