Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science – Queen’s University
Topic:s Ghani Lawal, Robot, autonomous system
Transcript Excerpt
Gripper System, a robot can autonomously pick up objects and then place them wherever a person wants to without any human interactions, so completely by itself. So warehouse companies such as Amazon, Mc Master, etc., cannot autonomously pick up the objects in their warehouses in a place where people want. So it makes it more efficient by making it faster and then increases the chance of an object being mishandled. KSR robot is handling it completely. Additionally, Ghani Lawal’s partner – Sam, mostly designed the claw. The partners had to cut out the pieces, and the three-parent youth reprinted the gears as well and then connected all the wires together. The interviewer asked a little more about the technical aspects. So detecting it is very accurate, and it can detect every object in terms of positioning over the object. It is quite capable of that one restriction if a person moves the objects while the program is running. It is unable to cope with a dynamically moving system, so it kind of assumes that the box is not going to move once it starts getting to the workplace. There are two systems that are working together in this project. The first is the gripping mechanism which, as Ghani Lawal told the interviewer that people built from scratch so that it is a mechanism built of six stepper motors and six four sensors. On top of there, Arduino is used to controlling the unit, and a driver for each of the motors of the other system works alongside that one. The other partner – Aaron, developed an imaging software using Microsoft Connect to develop a 3D point cloud of the workplace. How it works is a person develops a point cloud of this space, a person finds the largest plane, and that’s assumed to be the floor. So a person can remove that from the data and what is left is small clusters of points. Then a person can run it through an algorithm that people have got to understand the orientation of the box that then positions the orientation and the position of the box. So the robot then positions itself over the box for the hand to grip. The interviewer asked about what kind of problems or issues Ghani Lawal had to overcome when the company was going through the design process. Ghani Lawal said that the company had lots of problems. The first problem was that the company had fried two Arduino boards because the company assumed one of the inputs on the drivers to be an input where is an output. Ghani Lawal and the company learned a lot. The company had to actually go through and step-by-step study each driver’s schematic and understand the current flow and how it could have possibly happened because the company made an assumption that was wrong. So that was the first mistake. There are a few other errors that came just from manufacturing problems; for example, there’s a little too much play or tolerance in the axles, which sometimes can lead to poor performance by the claw, so those are the main hardware problems. Another big problem is that this giant robot, after moving it, didn’t work at all, so it took a large group of people a long amount of time to figure out which of the hundreds of wires on here was just barely disconnected, so that was another big problem faced.
