ADOPTING A LIGHTWEIGHT ROBOTIC ARM AND INNOVATIVE DESIGN FOR TRIMMING TOOLS
Choosing a robotic arm for a mobile robot means ruling out the types of robot arms on industrial robots. The rules for robots that are fixed into position with arms that repetitively perform programmed sequences of strictly calculated motions don't apply to TrimBot.
Installing a lightweight arm usually used in medical environments is one of the breakthroughs made by Jochen Hemming's team at Wageningen University and Research.
Designing different trimming tools to attach to that arm, that can cut rose stems and trim topiary bushes with accuracy and precsion into any shape given, is another.
"There are many challenges here because we are dealing with an outdoor environment that is always changing... we are manipulating objects that are not solid, they will look different after we have finished manipulating them. That is all very different from classic robotic applications."
Dr. Jochen Hemming, Senior Researcher, Computer Vision and Research, Wageningen University and Reseach
Watch Jochen talk about Wageningen University and Research's resarch in the 40sec video clip below, taken from a short documentary on the TrimBot2020 project, Cutting Hedge Research, which you can watch by clicking here.
For more information contact:
Corin Campbell: Corin.Campbell@ed.ac.uk
Prof. Robert Fisher, Consortium Coordinator: rbf@inf.ed.ac.uk
