Trajectory Planning and Control of High-Speed Pick and Place in Industrial Processes

The manipulation of bottles in high speed conditions is a serious issue in industrial processes. The objective of this thesis is to develop novel systems to pick bottles from a high-speed conveyor and to place them on another conveyor with a predefined position and orientation. Each cycle of pick and place of bottles must be performed within a maximum time. The solution to this problem has been requested by a company and a joint patent on the proposed solutions is in a pending status. In a first step, the optimization of the present technology is proposed. In a second step, three different new solutions have been studied. For each proposed solution some novel manipulators and control systems have been studied and simulated. The comparison among control outputs and a detailed analysis in order to satisfy the objective of the thesis permitted us to define the novel system and the control architecture proposed.