A survey of robot manipulation in contact

In this survey, we present the current status on robots performing manipulation tasks that require varying contact with the environment, such that the robot must either implicitly or explicitly control the contact force with the environment to complete the task. Robots can perform more and more manipulation tasks that are still done by humans, and there is a growing number of publications on the topics of (1) performing tasks that always require contact and (2) mitigating uncertainty by leveraging the environment in tasks that, under perfect information, could be performed without contact. The recent trends have seen robots perform tasks earlier left for humans, such as massage, and in the classical tasks, such as peg-in-hole, there is a more efficient generalization to other similar tasks, better error tolerance, and faster planning or learning of the tasks. Thus, in this survey we cover the current stage of robots performing such tasks, starting from surveying all the different in-contact tasks robots can perform, observing how these tasks are controlled and represented, and finally presenting the learning and planning of the skills required to complete these tasks

Creation of an Experimental Engineering Toolbox for the Digital Transformation of Manual Jet Engine Assembly

The fast and safe motion of goods and people is one of the foundations of the modern world. Jet aircraft is the fastest transport at the moment along with high-speed trains. Accordingly, both production and maintenance of aircrafts are an important task of our modern industrial environment as well. Modern aircraft engines require appropriate care and understanding of design and manufacturing. This is even more important, as the production of aerospace engines remains a manual process in many cases with limited data sources. Thus, quality control will need to take into account verification of manufacturing and assembly steps through specific checks and controls whilst implementing additional data sources. Automation of tasks still is at a low level. In this article a review of the challenges with regard to controls, automation and process and technical understanding for aerospace engine production and repair is provided. As this requires the collaboration of many teams and partners, an improvement and step change towards deeper understanding and process efficiency is required. As many operations remain manual, innovations for how humans interact with the technology and collaborate with an industrial environment are needed. The project in this article demonstrates the creation and usage of the proposed solutions for collaboration, troubleshooting and error correction

Design Transactions

Design Transactions presents the outcome of new research to emerge from ‘Innochain’, a consortium of six leading European architectural and engineering-focused institutions and their industry partners. The book presents new advances in digital design tooling that challenge established building cultures and systems. It offers new sustainable and materially smart design solutions with a strong focus on changing the way the industry thinks, designs, and builds our physical environment. Divided into sections exploring communication, simulation and materialisation, Design Transactions explores digital and physical prototyping and testing that challenges the traditional linear construction methods of incremental refinement. This novel research investigates ‘the digital chain’ between phases as an opportunity for extended interdisciplinary design collaboration. The highly illustrated book features work from 15 early-stage researchers alongside chapters from world-leading industry collaborators and academics

Design Transactions: Rethinking Information for a New Material Age

Design Transactions presents the outcome of new research to emerge from ‘Innochain’, a consortium of six leading European architectural and engineering-focused institutions and their industry partners. The book presents new advances in digital design tooling that challenge established building cultures and systems. It offers new sustainable and materially smart design solutions with a strong focus on changing the way the industry thinks, designs, and builds our physical environment. Divided into sections exploring communication, simulation and materialisation, Design Transactions explores digital and physical prototyping and testing that challenges the traditional linear construction methods of incremental refinement. This novel research investigates ‘the digital chain’ between phases as an opportunity for extended interdisciplinary design collaboration. The highly illustrated book features work from 15 early-stage researchers alongside chapters from world-leading industry collaborators and academics

Robot Performing Peg-in-Hole Operations by Learning from Human Demonstration

This paper presents a novel approach for a robot to conduct assembly tasks, namely robot learning from human demonstrations. The learning of robotic assembly task is divided into two phases: teaching and reproduction. During the teaching phase, a wrist camera is used to scan the object on the workbench and extract its SIFT feature. The human demonstrator teaches the robot to grasp the object from the effective position and orientation. During the reproduction phase, the robot uses the learned knowledge to reproduce the grasping manipulation autonomously. The robustness of the robotic assembly system is evaluated through a series of grasping trials. The dual-arm Baxter robot is used to perform the Peg-in-Hole task by using the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the robot is able to accomplish assembly task by learning from human demonstration without traditional dedicated programming