A depth sensor to control pick-and-place robots for fruit packaging

This paper presents a powerful and inexpensive automated object detection and localization method for pick-and-place robots using a low cost, commercial 3D depth sensor.The robot control application developed for this project extracts relevant information such as the XYZ co-ordinates of an object’s location from a 3D depth map, generated by the depth sensor interface software. This information is then used by the robot control application to control a pick-and-place robot for handling object/fruit. Experiments have proven that object’s projected area and orientation can be extracted from the depth map provided by the 3D depth sensor. This type of depth sensor can be used in robotics research projects for short range environment mapping and navigation and for object detection and locating.