1987 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

STUDIES ON ROBOTIC MANIPURATOR-GRIPPER FOR YOUNG PLANT HANDLING

Research Project

Project/Area Number	61560277
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	農業機械
Research Institution	THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO, FACULTY OF AGRICULTURE
Principal Investigator	OKAMOTO Tsuguo THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO. ASSOC. PROFESSOR, 農学部, 助教授 (40031215)
Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)	KITANI Osamu THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO. PROFESSOR, 農学部, 教授 (00024539)
Project Period (FY)	1986 – 1987
Keywords	ROBOTIC / TISSUE CULTURE / SEEDLING / コンピュータ
Research Abstract	The aim of this study is to develop a robotic system for biotechnological operations such as tissue culture works in the seedling production system. It is important to handle tisssue and callus on tissue culture operations in bioclean rooms with germfree. To carry out these works without manual operations, a callus handling system for subculture with robotics was developped and tested. It was able to softly pick up a small piece of propagating callus thich was delicate and vulnerable in vitro. The robotic manipulator had held it between his fingers and put into a new culture medium automatically. The manipulator used here was Mitsubishi's "Move Master 2" multi-joint small industrial robot. The system consisted of the manipulator-gripper system, the image processing system and the computer control system. Both the manipulator-gripper system and the image processing system in a clean bench were controlled by the 16bit personal computer in real time. The monochromatic TV camera was used to get image data of callus. An image frame had 64000(H320xV200) pixels and each pixel data had sixteen brighness levels(4 bits data) in a CRT display. The size and centroid of callus in two dimensional image was caluculated from image data. A finger force in gripping callus was measured with strain gage sensors and was constantlly controlled of 10 g in level with the sensor foodback by a computer. Then, it took about 20 seconds in total for the robot to get image data of one callus with TV camera, to caluculate some image parameters, to control the minipulator and gripper, to pick it up and to put into a Petri dish.