Testing Our Delta Robot on Real Products in the Shop

“We are doing a lot of testing with all sorts of products in the shop, and the robot has been doing great!”

That is the whole caption on the video we shared this week, and it is an accurate summary of what our shop floor looks like right now. A spec sheet tells you what a robot should do. Running it against a pile of real, mismatched items tells you what it actually does. This post explains why we test that way and which parts of the stack are being exercised when the robot picks something it has never seen before.

Why test on “all sorts of products”

Pick-and-place lines are rarely uniform. Shapes, sizes and surfaces change from one SKU to the next, and in applications like recycling sortation the stream is mixed by definition. A Delta robot that only performs on a calibrated test block is not much use to a production engineer.

So we put a variety of objects in front of the robot and let the full pipeline run: camera, recognition, conveyor tracking, motion planning and the gripper or suction tool on the end. Each new product is a fresh test of every link in that chain at once.

The stack being exercised

Vision-guided picking

Our pick-and-place solution pairs the Delta robot with an area scan camera triggered over EtherCAT, with vision latency under 2 ms. That matters because the robot is picking moving targets: the camera finds the part, the controller tracks it along the belt, and the arm meets it where it will be, not where it was.

On the Robot Controller, the zero-programming path for this is autorun. As shown in our autorun walkthrough, the firmware recognizes parts from the camera, tracks them on the moving conveyor, picks them, and computes each drop-off position inside the container from the box size, part size and configured spacing. When an application needs more control, the Python API lets you drop down to explicit moves.

The control panel: Omron EtherCAT servo drives

Behind the arm sits the Robot Electrical Panel. As we showed in an earlier post, our Delta control panel uses four Omron EtherCAT servo drives and an Intel mini PC with a 12th-generation Intel i5, running the robot’s kinematics at 4000 Hz.

Using standard, off-the-shelf EtherCAT drives is a deliberate choice. It follows one of our core values, openness: build on open industrial standards rather than proprietary lock-in. The robot does not depend on a closed drive ecosystem, and the same approach carries over to the 6/7-axis robots the panel is designed to support.

EtherCAT master software

Tying the drives, camera trigger and controller together is the Adeeb EtherCAT Master: a deterministic real-time master stack with a 250 μs minimum cycle time, sub-microsecond jitter and distributed clock synchronization. When the robot is chasing parts on a belt, deterministic communication is what keeps the camera timestamp, conveyor position and axis commands aligned every cycle.

What the hardware brings to the table

The Adeeb Delta Robot is designed for exactly this kind of varied work:

• 100+ picks per minute (25 g payload, 305 mm travel)
• ±0.05 mm repeatability across a 1000 mm workspace
• Quick-change tooling: tool-less end-effector swap in under 30 seconds for mixed-product runs
• EtherCAT native communication for direct integration with the master

Quick-change tooling is especially useful during product testing. Switching between a gripper and a suction cup to suit a new item takes seconds, not a maintenance window.

From the shop to a production line

This same stack is already sorting material in the field. In our plastic recycling case study, a recycling startup integrated a third-party camera through the Python SDK, wrote its own classification pipeline, and reached 98.5% sort accuracy on a mixed PET/HDPE/aluminum stream.

Shop testing is how we keep the system honest before it reaches lines like that. Every unfamiliar product we run is one more edge case found on our bench instead of yours.

See it on your parts

If you have a product mix you are unsure a Delta robot can handle, the fastest answer is to test it. Request a demo to see the Delta Robot running vision-guided pick and place, or contact our team to discuss your parts, cycle-time targets and integration needs.