Design And Implementation Of The Drug Delivery System Of The Automatic Pharmacy System

With the characteristics of high efficiency,low cost and wide application,the automatic cloud pharmacy system is a novel pharmacy system which can realize the24-hour on-line and off-line self-service purchasing functions.The automatic drug delivery system can deliver drugs efficiently,stably and automatically,which meets the needs of the automated cloud pharmacy system and is of great value for reducing costs and improving efficiency.Based on the machine vision and robotic arm technology,in this paper,a lightweight,low-cost and high-efficiency fully automated drug delivery system has been designed and implemented.Its specific hardware and software design ideas are:The hardware is mainly divided into four parts: the drug image acquisition module,the barcode image acquisition module,the robotic arm and its motion control module,and the computer.The drug image acquisition module contains a camera,a drug collector,a light source,and a stent,to acquire pictures of drugs in the drug collector.The barcode image acquisition module includes three cameras,a light source,a stand,and a stent.The robotic arm and its motion control module are mainly composed by a mechanical arm,a motion control board,a stepping motor,and a bracket.Its function is to grasp,place,rotate,and move drugs.The computer is employed to process data and control the system.In this system,an industrial sucker is used as the “hand” of the robot arm,which has the advantages of small damage to medicine kits and low cost.In addition,the system employs three cameras to photograph drug images from three orthogonal directions.Combined with the design of the rotating motion of robotic arm,barcodes locate at arbitrary positions of the medicine kits can all be clearly obtained on the premise of low cost and short shooting time.The software is mainly divided into four layers: presentation layer,business logic layer,interface layer,and bottom layer.The presentation layer is the system interfacefor system visualized operations.The business logic layer implements the software flow control.The drug positioning module and barcode identification module of the interface layer encapsulate programs like the photographing control program and the identification algorithm,and the robotic arm motion control program of the interface layer encapsulates the details of the serial communication of the single chip microcomputer(SCM).The interface layer separates the operation of upper application from the specific implementation details of each module,which can also reduce the coupling between the modules.The bottom layer is a lower computer SCM control program,whose corresponding upper computer program is the robotic arm motion control program in the interface layer.In this article,the software system development environment is mainly PyCharm,and the development language is python2.7.Among them,the MCU software is developed by C language under the development environment of IAR.The hardware and software debugging and experiments as well as the system testing have been performed in this paper.Results show that the average speed of medicine kit delivery of this system is 11 s/kit and 12 s/kit in the medicine kits that are placed neatly and randomly,respectively.The miss rate(the proportion of medicine kits that have not been successfully delivered among the total number of medicine kits)is about 6%.Therefore,the system scheme designed in this paper is feasible and can be applied in the commercial automated pharmacy system after further optimization.