Singulation Of Mail Using Robots And Sparse Range Imagery

Abstract

In this paper, sparse range data is extracted and used to guide a general purpose robot to singulate a scene. Sparse range data is used to identify the topmost mailpiece in a heap of enveloped flats, randomly scattered on a conveyor. The robot is guided to pick-up the identified mailpiece and orient it on an output conveyor. The output is a singulated and properly oriented stream of mailpieces. The robot and the vision system operate on the scene in an iterative fashion. The system is inherently jam free and average cycle times of 4.7 seconds per mailpiece have been demonstrated, using a general-purpose robot. This system has been expanded to handle irregular parcels. Each mailpiece is classified into one of several broad shape catagories, such as, flats, boxes, rolls, tubes, bags or highly-irregulars. Partial shape information and positional data are used to guide the robot to singulate the scene.