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.
Goal, approach and outcome
- Goal
- Sort plastic bottles from a moving conveyor without stopping the line for every pick.
- Approach
- Detect bottles with instance segmentation, track them as they move, plan grasps, and pick with a custom gripper on a 6-axis arm.
- Outcome
- A working vision-guided sorting demo with detection, tracking, and pick-and-place in one pipeline.
One sorting cycle
Each pass through the pipeline is one bottle: Mask R-CNN, conveyor tracking, grasp planning, the 6DOF arm, and the custom end effector.
Detect
Mask R-CNN finds bottles in the camera frame.
Track
Each bottle is followed on the moving belt, with belt and encoder sync keeping timing honest.
Pick
The arm plans a grasp, approaches the predicted position, and grips with a CAD-designed end effector.
Sort
The bottle is placed into its sorting location.
Calibration and sorting cycle
Calibrating robot and camera
The arm can only pick a moving bottle if the camera and the robot agree on where things are.
Robot and camera calibration
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.
