January 31, 2024

Announcing a new example application with MoveIt Pro: Warehouse Bin Picking

by Michael Wrock

Flexible & Fast For Any Brand of Robot Arm

At PickNik we built MoveIt Pro to help us and our customers reduce the time and effort required to set up a robotic system, so we can skip straight to solving the more interesting and challenging problems it was built to solve. To help illustrate the capabilities of the MoveIt Pro Developer Platform, we are releasing a series of reference applications of what it can deliver out-of-box.

In this application, we present our solution to one of the many tedious and repetitive tasks found in a warehouse environment: bin picking. Using our hardware-agnostic approach, we were able to easily execute the objective using a variety of arm and gripper combinations.

In this short video, you can see a Kinova Gen 3 and UR5e performing a bin-picking task using a two-finger gripper or suction end-effector. Using a ML-based behavior for image segmentation along with behaviors for depth image processing and point cloud registration, these objectives quickly and reliably generate and execute motion plans to remove items one at a time from a bin without training or prior knowledge of the object to be picked. MoveIt Studio allows on-site or remote operators to build, modify, and monitor the execution of this objective’s behavior tree as it picks, plans, and (if necessary) complete fallback or fault recovery.

Whether you’re looking for a springboard on which to launch your new robotics product, or need a reliable robotic solution for your commercial application, MoveIt Pro can help you solve your problem. MoveIt Pro leverages industry leading motion planners, world class robotics know-how, and the hard-won wisdom gained delivering and deploying robust solutions to challenging robotic problems. To learn more about how MoveIt Pro can help accelerate your product’s development contact us or read more here.