Plastic Bottle Sorting with 6DOF Arm
A 6-axis robot arm that detects plastic bottles on a moving conveyor, tracks them, and picks them up with a custom gripper.
- Sort plastic bottles from a moving conveyor without stopping the line for every pick.
- Detect bottles with instance segmentation, track them as they move, plan grasps, and pick with a custom gripper on a 6-axis arm.
- A working vision-guided sorting demo with detection, tracking, and pick-and-place in one pipeline.
The pipeline
Detect
Find bottles in the camera frame.
Track
Follow each bottle on the moving belt.
Pick
Plan a grasp and move the arm.
Sort
Place the bottle in the right place.
For technical readers: Mask R-CNN → conveyor tracking → grasp planning → 6DOF arm → custom end effector.
How it works
Bottles are segmented in the camera view, then tracked while the conveyor moves. Belt/encoder sync keeps timing honest. The arm approaches the predicted position, grips with a CAD-designed end effector, and places the bottle into a sorting location.
In action
Technical details
Real-time Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation; object tracking on the belt; motion planning with grasp sequencing; custom gripper geometry for bottle variance. Project notes described reliable detection and sorting on the moving conveyor.