SPARtS’ Goals

Storing and organizing small parts in workshops is clearly a relevant challenge when considering that finding the correct placement of a part among several possible places can be a laborious task. Usually, extra work is necessary to catalog the placement of each part and train people to know them and use correctly without mixing different items. All that work, however, takes a lot of workable hours and is still very much prone to human error.

Example of small parts and storage bin size

In order to improve the managing of storage and retrieval procedures of a storage of small parts, SPARtS is an Automated Retrieval Storage System in reduced scale that offers: retrieving an item’s storage bin with text search or visual identification, storing several items automatically with visual identification, visualizing the current stock of parts and, with all that, still allows direct manual acess to the bins remaning robust to incorrect placements of storage bins — but be careful, we do not detect if you manually put the wrong items in a storage bin!

Parts Selected for SPARtS

How it works

• Retrieve an item’s storage bin from the storage via a text search system: the search term is analyzed and the best matches are shown for the selection of the item to retrieve, with the confirmation of the wanted item, the bin retrieval system fetches the corresponding bin and brigs it to the user;
• Retrieve an item’s storage bin without specific knowledge of its identification: by placing an instance of the item in front of a camera, the system identifies it visually, displays it for the user in an application and, with their confirmation, the bin retrieval system fetches the correspondent bin to the user;
• Store automatically several items without specific knowledge of each part identification: our cleated conveyor belt system receives parts, identifies each item visually and drops the item in the correct bin, with our bin retrieval system fetching and returning the bin for the identified item;
• Visualize the current stock of each part: the estimated stock is constantly updated by measuring the weight of the storage bin each time its retrieved by the user or receives new parts to store;
• Allows direct manual access of the user to the bins with robustness to incorrect placement of bins: automatically identify and rearrange the bins with no risk of mixing one item from another with each individual storage bin unique RFID tag

Storage bin retrieval

A mechanism is built for moving a platform in the width and height axis in order to reach every possible storage bin position. The platform has a retractable mechanism for reaching a bin from underneath. The bin support is built to allow taking a bin by lifting it from underneath and returning a bin by putting it down over the support.

Each storage bin has its own RFID tag in it and the movable platform has a RFID sensor facing the storage bins. When moving, the sensor can compare the RFID tags with the saved positions of each bin to identify incorrectly placed bins by a manual user intervention.

Item automatic storage

With a conveyor belt mechanism, each part can be presented in front of a camera for visual identification and then dropped in its correspondent bin fetched from the storage. A user that wants to store up to 5 items should separate the items in the different bins, even though they don’t know their identities or placements in the storage. The visual identification system will identify the item category and the retrieval system will fetch the correct bin. The conveyor belt will move the identified objects for storage and drop all of them in a funnel, which directs them to the correct storage bin. Then, the retrieval system will send the bin back to the storage.