Approaches to Automatic Assembling of Plastic Toys

Nowadays, there are a lot of repetitive and tedious tasks carried out by people who can be replaced by an intelligent robotic system, allowing the operators to perform other kind of dexterous works. In this paper, the tackled task is the automatic assembling of a toy doll in a real environment. In this work, authors present different intelligent systems that are able to perform this kind of task. The main challenge is the soft material the dolls are made of, whose physical behaviour dynamic, as their features change depending of the applied force and temperature. Our proposal is a comparison of different approaches to perform the task, focusing on the handling of such flexible materials. On the one hand, the proposed method acquires the information of the process by the previous demonstration of an expert operator, allowing to record all necessary data (movements, positions, velocities, etc). On the other hand, a perception module is developed employing vision-based algorithms to detect the pieces and to perform the assembly using a robot manipulator.