Developing software for automatic control system for aligning semi-finished products

There is a developed automatic control system (ACS) to align semi-finished products on a high-speed conveyor line. It has a DR-1 robot manipulator and a working body that pressures and exerts a vibration impact. The system was created to in-crease the line efficiency and reduce the reject rate. The ACS includes an on-board microcontroller STM32F407VG (clock frequency 168 MHz, 192 KB RAM, 1 MB ROM) and a control computer based on an Intel Atom processor, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB ROM. The microcontroller software was developed in the C++14 programming language in the CubeIDE development platform. The FreeRTOS real-time operating system is used to process several tasks in a pseudo-parallel mode by a microcontroller: electric motor control, processing data from sensors, interaction with the control computer. The control computer has an implemented software in the C++11 programming language, the Linux Ubuntu 18.04 LTS operating system, the Robot Operating System (ROS) software platform. The control computer provides the ACS operator with an interface written in the Python programming language using the KivyMD library. However, the most interesting part of the software is solving the problems of direct and inverse kinematics for the delta manipulator and the algorithm for aligning semi-finished products. The problems of direct and inverse kinematics are solved in general terms. The paper gives the features of their implementation for the robotic manipulator DR-1. The authors carried out experiments to formalize the alignment algorithm for semi-finished products. It was necessary to perform about 110 alignments per minute, and this required finding the most efficient trajectory for moving a working body. The paper gives the results of testing the ACS software; considers various cases of arrangement of boxes with semi-finished products; assesses the safety of semi-finished products and packaging. The efficiency of the considered algorithm is also estimated. The use of the proposed ACS software made it possible to increase the line productivity and reduce the reject rate.