Material Visual Perception and Discharging Robot Control for Baijiu Fermented Grains in Underground Tank

Addressing the issue of excessive manual intervention in discharging fermented grains from underground tanks in traditional brewing technology, this paper proposes an intelligent grains-out strategy based on a multi-degree-of-freedom hybrid robot. The robot’s structure and control system are introduced, along with analyses of kinematics solutions for its parallel components and end-effector speeds. According to its structural characteristics and working conditions, a visual-perception-based motion control method of discharging fermented grains is determined. The enhanced perception of underground tanks’ positions is achieved through improved Canny edge detection algorithms, and a YOLO-v7 neural network is employed to train an image segmentation model for fermented grains’ surface, integrating depth information to synthesize point clouds. We then carry out the downsampling and three-dimensional reconstruction of these point clouds, then match the underground tank model with the fermented grain surface model to replicate the tank’s interior space. Finally, a digging motion control method is proposed and experimentally validated for feasibility and operational efficiency.