Line Tracking

  1. Line Tracking - How Does it Work?

    After a little digging into my records, I found that nearly 60% of the projects I’ve been involved with over the last three years have used vision and/or line tracking. It seems like integrators and end-users tend to need more help when using these options. If they’re lucky, they may have been trained by an expert somewhere, but they’re often stuck with just a manual (if they’re that lucky) to try and fix some pretty obscure bugs. A thorough understanding of how each piece of the stack fits together really helps these projects go a lot more smoothly. This post is on line tracking, but I’ll cover vision and how it fits into line tracking in future posts.

  2. Visual Line Tracking is Hard

    I spent last week helping an end-user with their two-robot visual line tracking system. As far as systems like these go, this one’s pretty simple: just two robots, one backlit conveyor, one camera and basically one product. The entire codebase comes in well under a thousand lines. We had issues that were hard to solve despite the simplicity. What follows is my process while debugging several common visual tracking errors.

  3. Your First Visual Tracking Application Part Two

    In part one of this series, we covered gripper design and testing, vision considerations, robot selection, cell layout and choosing the correct number of robots for visual tracking applications. This post will cover some other considerations: conveyor flow, hardware requirements, setup and configuration, and finally, programming.

    Here’s the full list with links to each section:

    1. Gripper
    2. Vision
    3. Robot Selection
    4. Layout
    5. Number of Robots
    6. Relative Conveyor Flow Direction
    7. Hardware
    8. Setup
    9. Programming

    Relative Conveyor Flow Direction

    If you consider a simple system with two conveyors: one for parts coming in, and one for parts going out, which direction(s) do they go? Do they both move in the same direction, or do they oppose eachother?

  4. Your First Visual Tracking Application - Part One

    Visual tracking is intimidating, much more intimidating than most other material handling applications. With all the additional hardware required (cameras, encoders, multiplexers) and steps to get things moving (camera calibration, tracking frame calibration, vision process creation, reference setting, accuracy tuning), it’s easy to get overwhelmed. And you haven’t even made any of your other extremely important decisions yet: what robot(s) should I use? What is the best layout for this application? Should I use parallel flow or counterflow? What type of gripper should I use? Can I get away with a single-pick gripper, or should I design one that picks two at a time? Should I use PickTool, or should I write it all from scratch? Lots of questions, difficult answers.