130942To develop a weight-transducing, vacuum cup end-effector for handling light objects which is unaffected by vacuum supply characteristics (hose stiffness and dynamics).ClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKMany applications in the food and horticultural sectors involve manual picking of individual objects from a bulk container e.g. making-up the weight of strawberry or mushroom punnets. As a punnet passes over a weigh cell the operator is given a signal which indicates whether the punnet is too light or too heavy and by what amount. The operator then adds or takes away an appropriate number of products. Using an array of vacuum cups it is possible to blindly pick strawberries out of a punnet automatically. However, commercially available vacuum cups give no information on the weight of the product they are carrying. Our objective in this project is to research and develop a weight-sensing vacuum cup device for lightweight objects that is unaffected by the vacuum hose stiffness or object-cup interactions. We will then use an array of these devices to investigate automatic-blind-picking and intelligent sorting of multiple objects e.g. strawberries into their respective weight categories.