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Research on workpiece location algorithm based on improved SSD

Lin Li (School of Mechanical and Automative Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)
Mingheng Fu (School of Mechanical and Automative Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)
Tie Zhang (School of Mechanical and Automative Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)
He Ying Wu (Guangzhou CNC Equipment Co., Ltd., Guangzhou, China)

Industrial Robot

ISSN: 0143-991x

Article publication date: 9 August 2021

Issue publication date: 3 January 2022

171

Abstract

Purpose

To improve production efficiency, industrial robots are expected to replace humans to complete the traditional manual operation on grasping, sorting and assembling workpieces. These implementations are closely related to the accuracy of workpiece location. However, workpiece location methods based on conventional machine vision are sensitive to the factors such as light intensity and surface roughness. To enhance the robustness of the workpiece location method and improve the location accuracy, a workpiece location algorithm based on improved Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) is proposed.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed algorithm integrates a weighted bi-directional feature pyramid network into SSD. A feature fusion architecture is structured by the combination of low-resolution, strong semantic features and high-resolution, weak semantic features. The architecture is built through a top-down pathway, bottom-up pathway, lateral connections and skip connections. To avoid treating all features equally, learnable weights are introduced into each feature layer to characterize its importance. More detailed information from the low-level layers is injected into the high-level layers, which could improve the accuracy of workpiece location.

Findings

It is found that the maximum location error at the center point calculated from the proposed algorithm is decreased by more than 22% compared with that of the SSD algorithm. Besides, the average location error evolves a decrease by at least 5%. In the trajectory prediction experiment of the workpiece center point, the results of the proposed algorithm demonstrate that the average location error is below 0.13 mm and the maximum error is no more than 0.23 mm.

Originality/value

In this work, a workpiece location algorithm based on improved SSD is developed to extract the center point of the workpiece. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is beneficial for workpiece location. The proposed algorithm can be readily used in a variety of workpieces or adapted to other similar tasks.

Keywords

Citation

Li, L., Fu, M., Zhang, T. and Ying Wu, H. (2022), "Research on workpiece location algorithm based on improved SSD", Industrial Robot, Vol. 49 No. 1, pp. 108-119. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-01-2021-0005

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

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