Design And Motion Control Research Of Eggs Picking Parallel Robot

Eggs industry, as one of pillar industries of Chinese agriculture, plays a key role in national economy. Eggs are our necessities in daily life as well as important agricultural products that have a bearing with national interest and people’s livelihood and social stability. Besides, eggs are industrial materials of great significance to many industries. Unlike the large-sized feeding that is prevalent in Europe or America, the bulk of China’s poultry farm are in large or medium-sized with scatter feeding, which makes it hard to form scale feeding, mounting difficult to the mechanized and automated production. Currently, most domestic large or small-sized chicken farms are operated by manual pickup and packaging for easy transportation, which wastes time and labor. While some large-sized chicken farms are equipped with eggs auto-collecting equipment in assembly line, but eggs auto-collecting equipment are only semi-automated. A full set of eggs automatic production equipment and fresh eggs processing systems have been invented, but the popularity rate is low due to the high cost of equipment.Agricultural robot has been gradually used in agricultural production following the application and promotion of agricultural hi-tech technologies. Parallel robot is well-known for its high precision, high motion acceleration and short action cycle, if applied in eggs auto-packaging assembly line, it can increase the labor productivity and cut down the labor cost, thereby improving the economic efficiency. Despite that, machine vision technology is generally necessary for positioning the packaging products because parallel robot needs the position of the target to be picked, adding to the cost and complexity of control. This results in higher cost of machine vision, increase of loads on controller, and higher cost of control system. Therefore, its application and promotion are affected by the high cost of complete machine.This paper studies a low-cost eggs picking parallel robot, which is tailored for the drawback resulting from the semi-automated eggs collecting equipment widely applied in domestic chicken farms. This design enables the automated process of eggs moving from conveyor belt to tray. The eggs picking parallel robot includes eggs transporting equipment, vibration correction equipment and Delta parallel robot. Eggs transporting equipment is used to collect, lay and convey eggs; vibration correction equipment is used to changing the disordered layout to ordered layout; while Delta parallel robot is used to pick and fill eggs to the tray.This paper elaborates on the design and realization of control system of parallel robot, including hardware composition, work flow and upper and lower computer programming and interface design; parameter design and end path planning of end effector, including the approach of coordinate positioning of parallel robot, end path analysis and tracking path forecast, torque analysis of elevation steering engine of end effector and suction pressure analysis of sucker, which are used as the basis for the type selection of steering engine and air pump; in the end, ADAMS-MATLAB co-simulation of parallel robot, analysis of pick-lay solution and prototype testing are carried out to obtain the required PID parameters and the optimum pick-lay solution.