Scenario Industrial Bin Picking On-Arm (2) (1)

Bin picking 

What is bin-picking?

Random or automated bin picking is typically at the input stage of a manufacturing system. It is widely used in automotive, white goods, mechanical assembly, or machine tending solutions. Instead of traditional static fixtures or pre-filled stacking patterns, a robot empties a bin bulk-filled with parts directly into a machine or into a feeder, conveyor, or sorter for further processing in the plant.

Bin-picking often contains only one type of part with a specific purpose rather than general goods. Bin-picking objects are highly varied in size, color, and material. Developing a bin-picking solution requires the precise placement of the objects for measurement, stamping, or other item manipulations. The ability to properly handle an object can determine if the next step in processing the part or materials will be executed correctly.

The choice of the vision system is critical to fulfilling the bin-picking requirements since the 3D camera impacts the robot’s ability to successfully detect, pick, and place all types of parts. On this page, you will learn more about how to increase the number of pickable parts using our Zivid 3D machine vision cameras.

Bin-picking example 2

Ordered Bins

The ordered bins can make it easier to find the appropriate pick poses for the objects. 

Bin-picking example 1

Unordered Bins

Usually, you will deal with unordered bins. These bins will have more reflections and interreflections and require a more complex picking solution 

Bin-picking challenges

Bin-picking is still a challenge in robotics. Problematic objects are typically complex-shaped, hard to manipulate, entangled, and/or highly reflective machined or polished metals. The difficulty stems from the inherent uncertainty in physics, perception, and control. Poor detection may lead to collisions, damaged parts, reduced productivity, and poor path planning. To get optimal detection, complete crisp point cloud quality gives the best possible detection for CAD matching. These point clouds must also be accurate and scale with reality to get the best pick pose for the part. 

3D machine vision solutions

Zivid 3D cameras deliver significantly higher quality at faster speeds than typical laser scanners used in bin picking today. With capture speeds less than 300 ms, the cameras cover high dynamic range scenes including shiny and reflective objects. 

Zivid-Detect

Detect

Zivid delivers high resolution and extreme precision native color 3D point clouds with minimal occlusion, and excellent artifact suppression. Significantly improving object recognition and increasing the number of detectable parts.

Zivid-Pick

Pick

Zivid enables more reliable detection of object boundaries for material handling and a true-to-reality representation of object size, rotation, and absolute position in relation to the robot coordinate system. Essential for accurate picking, avoiding mispicks, and crashes.

Zivid-Place

Place

Zivid, with its groundbreaking trueness, enables more demanding place operations for any pick and place robot. Placing or inserting more accurately for further processing, with known position and orientation, without colliding or damaging the parts.

See tiny and detailed objects, densely stacked or randomly arranged.

Zivid provides high resolution and precision point clouds with minimal occlusion, capturing a variety of shapes and sizes with all the fine details.

  • High accuracy for precise pick and place 
  • Infield correction that allows you to verify dimension trueness of your camera any place, any time
  • Hand-eye calibration Zivid handles the math so that our customer just needs to provide the dataset. Learn how it works

See shiny, reflective, machined, and polished parts

3D HDR and Artifact Reduction Technology (ART) ensures excellent suppression of imaging artifacts from reflections, inter-reflections, specular highlights, and high contrast transitions. ART includes: 

Scan from any angle to meet your needs

Different bin picking solutions have different needs. Zivid 3D cameras are designed for both stationary and robot-mounting to allow you to choose the optimal method to empty your bins successfully. 

Bin-picking-3D-vision-Zivid-camera
“New 3D camera technology was happening, smaller collaborative robots were happening, and it opened up whole new opportunities for manufacturing process automation.”

Peter Soetens
CEO of Pickit

Read customer stories

Next steps

3D bin-picking blog

Learn more about 3D bin-picking

In this blog, you will look at the fundamentals of bin-picking and what are the key considerations for choosing the ideal 3D camera for your application.

Learn More →
ebook bin picking page-1

Download our bin-picking eBook

This eBook is created to go through the most common challenges with bin-picking and how our latest 3D camera can solve those problems.

Download free eBook →
Bin-picking webinar-1

Watch our bin-picking webinar

In this joint webinar, 'Solving 3D Robot Vision Challenges with Pickit', we present how the Pickit 3D vision platform leverages Zivid's camera range to solve multiple applications. 

Watch Now →