Design of autonomous robotic system for removal of porcupine crab spines ...

• Main Author: Wu, Haodong
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 2023
• Subjects: Northwest Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48336/kem1-jt42; https://research.library.mun.ca/15932/

Among various types of crabs, the porcupine crab is recognized as a highly potential crab meat resource near the off-shore northwest Atlantic ocean. However, their long, sharp spines make it difficult to be manually handled. Despite the fact that automation technology is widely employed in the commercial seafood processing industry, manual processing methods still dominate in today’s crab processing, which causes low production rates and high manufacturing costs. This thesis proposes a novel robot-based porcupine crab spine removal method. Based on the 2D image and 3D point cloud data captured by the Microsoft Azure Kinect 3D RGB-D camera, the crab’s 3D point cloud model can be reconstructed by using the proposed point cloud processing method. After that, the novel point cloud slicing method and the 2D image and 3D point cloud combination methods are proposed to generate the robot spine removal trajectory. The 3D model of the crab with the actual dimension, robot working cell, and endeffector are well ...