Robotic technology towards industry 4.0: Automatic object sorting robot arm using kinect sensor

Abstract As one of the most commonly employed robots in manufacturing business, robot arm has to develop into a technology capable of successing the industry 4.0 revolution. A robot arm that can interact well with humans to solve a problem becomes one of the encouraging research topics. It requires the ability to behave like humans which causes a robot arm should be utilizing intelligent peripherals. This study aims to create a robot arm design that uses a Kinect sensor as a smart peripheral to approach the human ability to see an object. As a case study, a color-based object sorting simulation was conducted. The automatic movement that the robot used is based on inverse kinematics. The experimental test shows that average percentage errors for end-effector’s position in x, y and z coordinates are 5.83%, 5.89% and 8.59%, respectively. This result has led the robot arm equipped with the Kinect sensor managed well to sort and move objects based on the color.