Meet the robots at Reading: Introducing Baxter

Meet Baxter, one of the newer additions to the University of Reading.

Robots have been used in industry for many years. Early ones were employed in the car industry doing tasks such as welding. Others have been used picking objects on production lines. The Baxter Robot is a modern industrial robot capable of performing such relatively complex tasks, and here we illustrate the robot picking up golf balls and putting them in a box.

This sounds easy – after all if we want to pick something up, we just look to see where it is and move our hands accordingly. For a computer to do so, it needs a complicated program – using a variety of techniques including image processing, edge detection, etc…

The key point is that in order to pick up the balls, the gripper at the end of the robot arm has to be in the right place. Hence the robot has to be able to detect where the balls are – which it does using a camera at the end of its arm. If the gripper is above a ball, fine, but if the ball is to the left then the gripper should be moved to its right.

Let’s watch this in action.