Robotic gripper for calli transfer

Robotic gripper for calli transfer: The design and development of a robotic gripper to automate calli transfer to improve the quality and quantity of plant regeneration

Konijnenberg, Thom (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering)

Della Santina, C. (mentor)
Kober, J. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Mechanical Engineering | BioMechanical Design

2022-09-09

During the transfer of calli in plant regeneration, the repetitive work of pick and placement of calli in new agar is still done by human operators. This process can be automated to eliminate labour-intensive work. The thesis focuses on the development of a robotic gripper to automate the transfer of calli. To be able to grip calli, first its physical properties have to be investigated. With different weights, the maximum allowable force before calli damage was determined.
Subsequently a methodological design process was performed, which consisted of formulating system requirements and conceptual design analysis with the use of the Kesselring method. In order to finalize the design, the two highest scoring gripper concepts were chosen to be further explored. Both concepts were transformed in a 3D design and printed to validate its effectiveness for gripping calli. Of those two concepts, the best performing gripper was further optimized and used as prototype for additional validation. To validate this new gripper prototype, calli of different shapes and sizes were transferred to a new petri dish. To correctly grip the calli, a script was created to adequately detect and determine the size of the calli. The plastic prototype had high slack and inaccuracies due its the material. Therefore, the prototype was made of aluminium, with the use of Computer Numerical Control (CNC). Experiments revealed that the aluminium prototype had a success rate of 98% when gripping calli. In conclusion, the designed aluminium gripper was able to grip and release the calli without damage and has therefore great potential to automate calli transfer and thereby improve the quality and quantity of plant regeneration.

Gripper
Callus
Pick and Place Robot

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e26f3874-7a87-4041-8c3f-fb1f510985d5

Student theses

master thesis

© 2022 Thom Konijnenberg