Mobile cobots for autonomous raw-material feeding of automatic packaging machines

Human-robot collaboration has become a key driver for manufacturing sustainability in Europe. Thanks to the many advantages that a fenceless, shared working environment offers, industry has recently grown a particular interest in collaborative robotics, thus sustaining the transition from academy to factories of this technology. In this work, we present a robotic solution integrating a serial manipulator and a mobile platform, both characterized by collaborative features, for feeding raw material to a packaging automatic machine. The goal is to provide an overview of such a complex system from different points of view, including hardware and software architecture, trajectory planning, computer-vision strategies, customized mechanical design, and field validation. We will describe the obtained results and the lessons learned, and provide an outlook for future evolution.