A visually guided robot system for food handling applications

This paper presents the initial development of a visually guided robotic system for handling food products that are often presented in an unstructured manner. In order to handle the communications between the host and robot controller more effectively, we developed multi-level commands within the host programming environment. Vision guided grasping is described in the context of vector manipulations. The system is able to calculate the grasp vector according to both online visual information and off-line data based on the food product and gripper type in consideration. A case study is presented where the system handles trapezoidal shaped fish products