Here are some of the pix from my experimenting with small-scale robot manufacture in my living room.

The "parts sorter" — the input section of the "manufacturing plant" — looks like a circular production line carrying a series of trays to several "test points". At one test point a camera hooked to a PC examines the tray under a strong light and decides which of 2 main directions to send it.

In the setup below, the PC looks for 3 mm washers and 3 mm nuts. If the tray has some, it gets dumped to a "filter" module that strains out the washers and nuts and puts them in a tray and sends them back to the line. If the tray originally had no washers and nuts it gets sent to the "dump" where contents are binned and empty tray goes back to the line.

You get the idea.

Somewhere in there is a pic of the output bins showing a relatively low error rate afte renough filtering and feeback.

What the butler saw:

What the PC sees:

What the vision s/w finds ("target objects"):

Various other target pix:

Output bins: