How can self-driving cars handle going down the road at 70mph, yet bin-picker robots have to move so slowly to be accurate?
Seems like a contradiction to me.
Seems like a contradiction to me.
Simply put, the convergence problem is getting to the correct orientation and position to positively pick up an item. Factory robots finesse that by putting parts in a narrow area in the work space but modern car assembly robots can pull parts in a wide variety of orientations and positions.
Current research has focused on visual systems as it is pretty cheap these days to put a couple of cameras near the end effector to provide a stereoscopic view to the effector converging on the target.
These issues are all eminently solvable, but the solutions take time and make the system harder to work on and more expensive, without generating a contribution to knowledge or academic papers.
Better to have a slow system you can transport to demonstrations than a fast system bolted to a lab floor that you can't demo anywhere :)
Is the limitation here sensor speed or computing speed?
Certainly not motor speed, I see once the robot determines what to do, it immediately moves much more quickly.
Here's a demo of speed and accuracy using standard industrial robots: