<title>Automated packing of arbitrary shapes</title>

Abstract

The manipulation of objects under visual control is one of the key tasks in the implementation of robotic, automated assembly, and flexible manufacturing systems. This paper considers one problem in this area, that of automating the packing of 2-dimensional arbitrary shapes into a 2- dimensional bounded region, also of arbitrary shape. Two techniques are examined and compared, the first technique is based on the concept of packing shapes in terms of their minimum area bounding rectangle. The second technique is based on image morphological transform techniques using interval coding, whereby the problem translates to the morphological manipulation of large structuring elements within the binary image domain. We will show that the morphological technique implemented, which we call the modified opening packing algorithm, enables efficient packing of arbitrary shapes.