Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The objective is to automate the assembly of the ""seeding toolbar"" manufactured at the Vaderstad Industries (https://www.vaderstad.com/ca-en/). The seeding toolbars consist of small and modular sections, called control sections, that are assembled together one at a time. First, two control sections are assembled to the central core of the seeding toolbar from right and left. Further control sections are sequentially assembled to these two control sections. Currently, moving the control sections to their pre-assembly positions, to build the entire seeding toolbar, is carried out by human operators. Each control section, after being built within the control-section assembly line, is put on four wheeled hydraulic jacks by which they are guided towards their final pre-assembly location using a teach pendant. The control sections are then bolted to either the central core of the seeding toolbar or other control sections already assembled into the toolbar.Vaderstad is keenly interested in mechanizing and automating the assembly process of their seeding toolbars. This will be achieved by adding servo controllers to the wheeled hydraulic jacks that the control sections are mounted on, as the locomotion unit, and conducting autonomous motion planning and navigation of control sections to their desired poses, while avoiding collision with static (e.g., parts of the assembly line, the seeding toolbar, etc.) and/or dynamic objects (e.g., work crew, moving parts of the overhead gantry cranes, etc.). The research objective is to develop sensor-based motion planning, control, and navigation algorithms to automate the entire process of moving each control section to its pre-assembly configuration on the seeding toolbars, therefore, no human operator would be needed to navigate and guide them. This will be achieved by using the information obtained via two narrow-field-of-depth Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras on board mounted onto the control sections and also one wide-view camera in a fixed position on the overhead infrastructure on the manufacturing floor.