Vision Based Robotic Paint Arm

Painting is a tough and time consuming job as well as hazardous for human health due to the chemicals used in it. Chemicals cause severe health problems for the workers so they have to follow the safety rules necessarily. On other side, the high demand of painters is increasing day by day and it can

Project Title

Vision Based Robotic Paint Arm

Project Area of Specialization

Robotics

Project Summary

Painting is a tough and time consuming job as well as hazardous for human health due to the chemicals used in it. Chemicals cause severe health problems for the workers so they have to follow the safety rules necessarily. On other side, the high demand of painters is increasing day by day and it can be seen to rise in near future. 

Vision Based Robotic Paint Arm is the solution of the problems related with manual wall painting. This is a 8 Degree Of Freedom Robot that will be consisting different parts in it.Starting From the Base of Arm, we will be moving towards the arm structure and spray gun over the Arm.

 The Arm will be implemented over a 2 Degree Of Freedom Robotic Mobile Base which will be ocuupied with SONAR sensors for obstacle avoidance to ensure human robot safety as well as path planning inside the room. The fixed wheels of base will be BMX pneumatic type which are vibration damper as well as cost effective. Caster wheels will be used to increase stability beacuse the painting process will cause vibrations in the structure. The base will be designed to support maximum weight of arm and spray gun. Base will be consisting of an additional system to measure the vibrations of the structure to observe the empty tank situation. 

The 6DOF robotic arm will be consisting of Camera intarfaced with Raspberry Pi microcontroller. Camera will be used for image processing using open CV. The word 'vision' is specified for the camera as the camera will be working as an eye of the robot. Camera will detect the wall to start the paint operation. If the wall is not detected in the camera, it will ask the mobile base to move in the room towards the start paint position. PI cam will be used for this purpose and it will be measuring the wall dimensions as well.

The joints of Arm will be actuated with DC geared motors and BLDC geared motors. The structure of arm will be aluminium based. The low weight DC geared motors will reduce the vibrations and increase the stability. 

An 2 Degree Of Freedom electric gun will be mounted over the arm for the spray painting. This whole process will be controlled with Raspberry pi controller.

The Vision Based Robotic arm will be much more efficient compared to human workers.  The Robot is suitable for the market demand as the COVID pandemic has limited the human activities. This will reduce the human to human interaction.  The demand of the painters is increasing due to the developement in the infrastructure as well as interior designing. The robot will reduce the work load over the painters and will reduce the cost of labor as well.

The Robot will also be used to paint the specific designs on the wall. For example, by uploading a picture in the gallery, the robot will paint the same design on the wall.

Project Objectives

The objective is to design a robotic arm that can paint the walls using spray painting technique by using different means. We will be able to learn image processing and object detection by designing such a robot. The main thing of this project is vision which will be implemented to the robotic Arm.

Vision is a word that is related to Artificial intelligence and Machine learning. Let us relate it with the human vision, when a person have to paint some area, he first analysis the surface by using vision and senses and then chooses the color to be painted on that area. Human uses all his senses for a perfect work but vision is important than all of these senses. If the same vision is implemented with robotic arm then the robot will work much faster and clean with compare to human. 

The objective is to provide the best alternative of the manual painting. The objective is to design a robot that will reduce the human efforts of the painting. Manual wall painting is repetitive process and human workers are intended to get bored during the work. Imagine being at workplace and rubbing the brush over the walls for the whole day. Human operators often make mistakes while working due to the lack of interest.There are several things which are related to vision based robotic arm which are mentioned below:

• The objective is to design a 6DOF robotic Arm which will move in 360degree angle to perform its task.
• The aim is to implement a camera for the vision purpose. The objective is to learn about camera interfacing with microcontroller.
• The objective is to learn about image processing and object detection using camera.
• The objective is to learn about 3D mapping and localization.
• Microcontroller will be used for camera interfacing as well as motor operations. The objective is to implement a suitable microcontroller for desired task.
• The objective is to learn the working of motors and implementation of suitable motors for the better performance of robotic arm.
• The objective is to implement a fully functioning robotic arm which will be used for spray painting.

Project Implementation Method

Structure Implementation:

First of all, the structure of Mobile base and Arm is designed with the help of SolidWorks and Autocad. The movement of the mobile base is considered thoroughly . The support for both the fixed wheels and rare wheels is designed by keeping the stability factor in mind.The Mobile Base structure is designed to support the maximum load of Arm and electric spray gun as well as other components like the microcontroller and power supply. The structure is designed using aluminium rods.

The Arm is also designed  by the Aluminium rods. The joints of Arm are actuated by different kind of motors. The length of arm is designed according to the height of the room as well as the stability factor. As the standard room height is 2.7meters so the Arm is designed to reach that height. The arm is 3axis so is divided into different parts and connected by the help of joints. The First joint part have more length than the other two parts. The arm is designed to move in three axis. It is decided according to the dimension of the motor that which joint will work.

Image Processing:

Image processing is the main part of the project. Camera is used with the microcontroller for this purpose. Image processing is done with the help of Open CV. Image processing is actually a process where we store data on some nodes and the picture taken by the camera is cross matched with that data and that takes decisions according to the results. We will be using the image processing for edges detection of the walls. The camera will detect the edges of the walls and the dimensions will be measured. 

We are interested in finding the edges of the shapes in the image, and so the colors are not important. Our strategy will be to read the image as grayscale, and then apply Canny edge detection. Note that when reading the image with the grayscale libraries, image is converted to a float64 grayscale with the original data type range being mapped to values ranging from 0.0 to 1.0.

This program takes three command-line arguments: the filename of the image to process, and then two arguments related to the double thresholding in step four of the Canny edge detection process. These are the low and high threshold values for that step. After the required libraries are imported, the program reads the command-line arguments and saves them in their respective variables.

Path Planning:

The Path planning is done using ultrasonic sensors implemented over the arm. The ultrasonic sensors observe the obstacles in the path and also the area of the wall to be covered. When the area is completed , the robot terminates the painting operation.

Benefits of the Project

US labor bureau statistics are showing positive peak in the demand of painting employers which is expected to grow up to 20% between 2012 to 2022 [5],which means that the US will be getting the demand of 62,600 workers during this period. The same demand can be expected from more populated countries as well where the birth rate is higher like Africa, China and India. All these facts are in the favor of robotizing the application.

When the demand of anything in the market rises, its cost also increases proportional to the demand. The demand of workers is rising day by day as the progress in the infrastructure is increasing. Infrastructure is the backbone of the development of any country. The objective is to boost the work in this era and and this can be done in only one way by robotizing the application. Huamans take so much time while performing the work. The same work can be done in less time as well as less price by using the robot.

The human presence is prohibited at many places due to safety concerns. For example working at a nuclear power plant is dangerous for the humans so the robot is the best alternative that will perform the same task without any safety issues.

The chemicals used in the paint are also hazardous for human health so the objective is to reduce the human interaction with the chemoicals and this can be done by the vision based robotic arm.

Another problem with manual painting is associated with human interaction as the COVID pandemic has affected the whole world. Humans workers cannot work together due to the covid so the work can stop at workplaces. The objective is much clear now that it will not let the work stopped in any condition.

A robotic arm can spray 8 hours a day without a break and produce the exact same pattern every time. Over time employees need a break, can become sick, or have trouble concentrating on a repetitive task.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Final deliverable will be consisting of

Circuit Diagram:

A circuit diagram of the connection between different motors, camera, Sonar sensors, microcontroller and power supply is to be provided along with the project. Circuit diagram will be designed over a specific software as final deliverable.

Codes:

The specific Programming codes will be provided along with the project. The codes will be written in specific programming language will be perhaps python with different libraries imported in it. The open CV will be working through this code so we will have to deliver the codes. The codes will be used for the motors operations as well as the image processing.

Mechanical structure:

The mechanical structure of the robot will be provided as final deliverable. The structure  of the robot including mobile base, robotic arm and other things will be provided.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Energy

Other Industries

Manufacturing

Core Technology

Robotics

Other Technologies

Internet of Things (IoT), 3D/4D Printing

Sustainable Development Goals

Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com