Metallic Scrap Collection Robot with Efficient Trajectory

Abstract

Metal waste management is one of the major issue in today's and future industries. Efficient metal waste management in industries is very important in order to ensure, a safe environment, make room for future operations and reuse of this material. At present, in many industries, these metal scraps are still being collected by manpower, which is a cumbersome task. Therefore, it needs to be automated, so in this work we have opted a robotic solution for the metal scrap collection. We have developed an electromagnetic robot that can recognize and collect various metal scraps spread across an area. The process of recognition is carried out with the help of the image processing techniques on the images obtained through the camera installed in the area. The robot collects the scrap using the electromagnetic arm by visiting it. Our aim in this work is to control the robot's trajectory so that all the scraps identified can be collected within a minimum time by minimizing the distance travelled by the robot. We used two algorithms, Prim's and Kruskal's, to design this trajectory. In order to show the significance of both algorithms to our problem, we performed Matlab simulations and showed their comparison in terms of the total distance traveled by the robot to collect all the metal scraps.