Remote Shopping Robot System, -Development of a hand mechanism for grasping fresh foods in a supermarket

The purpose of this research is to develop a robot system which helps humans to remotely accomplish a daily given task such as shopping. This teleoperated system is based on simple mutual human-robot cooperation where the person remotely communicates with the mobile robot. We define the specific task of buying FRESH foods in a supermarket from a remote location. In order to do shopping operations, the robot has to be able of grasping a large amount of objects with different textures, shapes and weights which include fruits and vegetables with soft and irregular forms. After the user chooses the product to buy, the process is the next, firstly the robot has to find the object, then grasp it and then place it into a shopping basket. In this work, we built a system according to the previously explained requirements which involves autonomous navigation, environment perception, object manipulation and teleoperation. In this paper, we present the developed suction hand for picking fresh foods and evaluate its operating performance through experimental results