Cobots are highly sought by manufacturing companies in contrast to fully automated production lines, as they provide the additional benefit of flexible operations. A major hurdle with current collaborative setups is tedious setup times for efficient and robust co-working as well as poor support for random interruptions.
This project focuses on enabling autonomous collaborative operations for serial manipulators where interruptions from human agents occur at random while ensuring minimal setup times. To this end, two primary aspects that impact task execution are addressed, namely execution time and co-working as enumerated below:
- A method is developed to minimise the total distance travelled, by following the most optimal sequence for the given task while retaining online operational capabilities
- A real-time replanning and co-working algorithm for randomly interruptive environments is developed and implemented to ensure continued operation even when regions of the workspace are occluded while guaranteeing safety of the human agents in the workspace. The co-working controller operates fully autonomously.
An example of the working of the deployed on a prototype platform consisting of a collaborative UR10e arm, a stereo camera for static environment mapping and a laser scanner for mapping of dynamic obstacles is shown in the video.
Contact: Daniel Gossen
music: madiRFAN – Both of Us (https://pixabay.com/music/beats-madirfan-both-of-us-14037/)
Watch the video on our Youtube channel: here.
