Describes a concept for end-effector operation for handling product items that are flexible or variable in physical properties such as size, shape or firmness. The emphasis is placed on the sensing and control issues of such systems. Our approach to variable product handling adopts a modular, sensor-oriented methodology that can be applied to a diversity of situations. We describe related research work and the architecture we have developed for control, actuation and sensing. We also discuss aspects of the sensory and mechanical configuration of our gripping testbed, its implementation and test results.

Natural products, such as food products derived from animals and plants, exhibit a high degree of variability. Key factors for successful automation of these processes are the ability to sense workpiece variations and the flexibility to alter control strategies accordingly. This paper describes a robot system which incorporates complex sensing with knowledge based control. The system is used to remove the lateral pin bones from fish fillets by means of a robot manipulated waterjet cutter. A sensing system is used to obtain geometric and positional information about each fillet. A knowledge based control system uses a priori knowledge of the fish species and information from the sensing system to generate the appropriate robot commands. The successful deboning of fish fillets demonstrates the viability of this approach.>