Robotic Document Sort

The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year. (1) That's a 1.02 m (3.35 ft) tall stack of paper, per person!

What happens to potentially sensitive business documents after use?

Iron Mountain Inc. and other document management companies periodically collect and process them, securely shredding, preserving, or digitizing them. 

But these documents often contain defects...

• Paperclips

• Staples

• Dog ears

• Post Its

...And much, much more!

Digitization is a costly, manual process to avoid jamming scanners or damaging documents.

In 2019, Iron Mountain reached out to Olin's SCOPE program (Senior Capstone Project in Engineering) to find a way to speed up their document digitization process. 

Our team of 5 students studied Iron Mountain document preppers at work for inspiration.

Key Insights

1. Experienced document cleaners rivalled and sometimes beat mechanical scanner speeds.

2. A clean leading edge is essential for scanning.

3. There are 3 main types of defects.

88.09% Simple defects (Staple, paper clip, binder clip, etc. Visible and easy to address.)

11.90% Invisible defects (Primarily rips in paper. Not easily visible but causes damage during scanning.)

0.01% Manager level defects (Glued bindings, etc. Require experienced assistance to resolve.)

Delays primarily occur in the document digitization process before scanning, during document processing and cleaning.

The bulk of defects are Simple and Invisible defects, but manager level defects require exponentially more time to resolve and halt the document cleaning process until resolved.

We developed a robotic arm capable of preclassifying, sorting, and reordering documents based on their defect type.

• Generated 50+ unique designs

• Simulated ROS-controlled R-17 robotic arm in Gazebo and modelled IK_Fast motion paths

• Simulated paper deformation and tested various defect detection methods

• Analytically determined the best paper grasping end effector after testing 8+ solutions, including...

  • High voltage electrostatic gripping

  • Magnets to lift or sort by staples/metal defects

  • Physical friction reliant grippers (soft robots, phalanges, printer rollers)

  • Sticky grippers, to adhere to the page

  • A variety of suction cups and a vacuum pump

By parallelizing the document cleaning process, we eliminated the time cost of task switching.

Public Project Artifacts

Official Olin website link

https://www.olin.edu/research/2018-19/Iron%20Mountain%20Information%20Management%2C%20LLC