A pneumatically-actuated transferring robot for industrial forge manufacturing using visual inspection technology

This paper presents the development and evaluation of a pneumatically-actuated transferring robotic system that uses visual inspection technology. The objective of this research is to implement the manufacturing automation in a customized industrial forging process. The robot has 5-DOF with a 2-fingered gripper placed on the gantry mechanical structure stage. Furthermore, the robotic system consists of two digital cameras for the visual inspection, which are utilized to test the temperature and the posture of the forging ingot. The required grasping force of the gripper and the accurate position regulation are obtained by pneumatic actuators. The control of the pneumatic actuators is based upon the use of programmable logic controllers (PLC). Subsequently, the temperature and perpendicularity detection capabilities of the visual inspection system are analyzed. Finally, experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the presented robotic system.