Sorting out a mountain of screws and other workbench detritus by hand is a task that only appeals to a select few of us. [AdrienR] is not one of those people. He believes the job is better suited to a robot, so he built an intelligent and good-looking machine that does just that.

[Adrien]’s sorting bot is capable of organizing a hodgepodge of parts quickly and effectively. He simply scatters the parts on the light box work surface, illuminates it, and takes a picture with a downward-facing web cam. An algorithm studies the parts and their positions using OpenCV image processing, and sends the triangulation back to the arm so it can pick and place the parts into laser cut boxes using a home brew electromagnet.

[Adrien] calls this a work in progress. He plans to control it with a Raspberry Pi so it can be a standalone unit, and will probably move the parts boxes to the outside curve. Drop yourself past the break to see it sort.

If delta robots are more your sort, this one has balls. Colored balls.

Spelled “stainless” for US readers…but that’s just an excuse to make a gripper arm. Woot!

INOX is a BRAND of stainless steel. It is inappropriate to call all stainless steel Inox, regardless of where you are from. Stainless is more appropriate, however it can even be inappropriate in some cases.

No, the term inox comes from French (abbreviation of inoxydable).

That was the best demo video they had? It missed! If you HAVE to push out a demo video before something is working well, keep the camera rolling until it doesn’t miss!

it also looks like it putting all the parts into the same box, not really sorting is it? But other then that the fact that it seems to find the component is a huge accomplishment. Now I hope that there is a demagnetizer in that build also, because sometimes it’s really annoying when parts seem to cling together because they are magnetized. Promissing project, fun to see it work. hope to hear/see more of it.

It’s sorting by shape – not size. Bolts, washers, and nuts each have their own bin for sorting.

Yeah, and it is the threads/pitch that is the tough part about sorting nuts/bolts, IMHO!

Since when is this Slashdot?

three words: take my money.

I cannot open instrutables pages, always report “web page carshed”

Its cool buut washers go with washers not nutz. Left three pieces. Now add conveyor belt and ability to pick up /distinguish non ferrous. Thread size and length discrimination needed. Round heres we gots SAE and metric. Also would be nice if could read tape reel fallouts and test them while sorting. Would be nice if end effector could do some axis instead of whole arm up/down. Fix it. Fix it.

Very cool. If it could sort bolts by length and thread, That’d be amazing. And better than me…

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