An approach to reducing parameter uncertainty for robotic surface assembly tasks

In contrast to hard automation, which relies on the precise knowledge of all parameters and special-purpose machinery, the goal of flexible assembly is to overcome the inherent uncertainty in the location of the parts. The main result of this dissertation is that, for rigid, non-deformable objects, more accurate estimates of parameters, which describe their position and orientation in Cartesian space, can be obtained through active part interaction and estimation using numerical methods. If the objects have large polyhedral or convex features, the parameter estimation problem can be recasting terms of fitting the collected empirical data to a suitable geometrical model. The planning and execution steps are treated as conceptually separate from the estimation.Additionally, an algorithm for automatic conversion of a compliant path from the Cartesian to the joint space of a general-purpose, 7 degrees of freedom robotic arm is described. This allows for the assembly strategies to be planned in terms of objects'topological features in the task frame. A `back-drivable' Barrett WAM robotic arm without a force sensor was used in all experiments, and approximate compliant motion was achieved by relying on torque limits and impedance. Consequently, the primary focus is on planning, control, and assembly without force sensing. The underlying concepts, however, are much more general and could be extended to incorporate force feedback. Grasping is outside of the scope of this work, and it is assumed throughout that one of the parts is rigidly attached to the end-effector of the robot

Reducing Uncertainty in Head and Neck Radiotherapy with Plastic Robotics

One of the greatest challenges in achieving accurate positioning in head and neck radiotherapy is that the anatomy at and above the cervical spine does not act as a single, mechanically rigid body. Current immobilization techniques contain residual uncertainties that are especially present in the lower neck that cannot be reduced by setting up to any single landmark. The work presented describes the development of a radiotherapy friendly mostly-plastic 6D robotic platform for positioning independent landmarks, (i.e., allowing remote, independent positioning of the skull relative to landmarks in the thorax), including analysis of kinematics, stress, radiographic compatibility, trajectory planning, physical construction, and phantom measurements of correction accuracy. No major component of the system within the field of imaging or treatment had a measured attenuation value greater than 250 HU, showing compatibility with x-ray-based imaging techniques. Relative to arbitrary overall setup errors of the head (min = 1.1 mm, max = 5.2 mm vector error) the robotic platform corrected the position down to a residual overall error of 0.75 mm +/- 0.33 mm over 15 cases as measured with optical tracking. This device shows the potential for providing reductions to dose margins in head and neck therapy cases, while also reducing setup time and effort

Orientation Uncertainty Characteristics of Some Pose Measuring Systems

We investigate the performance of pose measuring systems which determine an object’s pose from measurement of a few fiducial markers attached to the object. Such systems use point-based, rigid body registration to get the orientation matrix. Uncertainty in the fiducials’ measurement propagates to the uncertainty of the orientation matrix. This orientation uncertainty then propagates to points on the object’s surface. This propagation is anisotropic, and the direction along which the uncertainty is the smallest is determined by the eigenvector associated with the largest eigenvalue of the orientation data’s covariance matrix. This eigenvector in the coordinate frame defined by the fiducials remains almost fixed for any rotation of the object. However, the remaining two eigenvectors vary widely and the direction along which the propagated uncertainty is the largest cannot be determined from the object’s pose. Conditions that result in such a behavior and practical consequences of it are presented

불확실성을 포함하는 조립작업을 위한 컴플라이언스 기반 펙인홀 전략

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 융합과학기술대학원 융합과학부(지능형융합시스템전공), 2020. 8. 박재흥.The peg-in-hole assembly is a representative robotic task that involves physical contact with the external environment. The strategies generally involve performing the assembly task by estimating the contact state between the peg and the hole. The contact forces and moments, measured using force sensors, are primarily used to estimate the contact state. In this paper, in contrast to past research in the area, which has involved the utilization of such expensive devices as force/torque sensors or remote compliance mechanisms, an inexpensive method is proposed for peg-in-hole assembly without force feedback or passive compliance mechanisms. The method consists of an analysis of the state of contact between the peg and the hole as well as a strategy to overcome the inevitable positional uncertainty of the hole incurred in the recognition process. A control scheme was developed to yield compliant behavior from the robot with physical contact under the condition of hybrid position/force control. Proposed peg-in-hole strategy is based on compliance characteristics and generating the force and moment. The peg is inserted into the hole as it adapts to the external environment. The effectiveness of the proposed method was experimentally verified using a humanoid upper body robot with fifty degrees of freedom and a peg-in-hole apparatus with a small clearance (0.1 mm). Three cases of experiments were conducted; Assembling the peg attached to the arm in the hole fixed in the external environment, grasping a peg with an anthropomorphic hand and assembling it into a fixed hole, and grasping both peg and hole with both hands and assembling each other. In order to assemble the peg-in-hole through the proposed strategy by the humanoid upper body robot, I present a method of gripping an object, estimating the kinematics of the gripped object, and manipulating the gripped object. In addition to the cost aspect, which is the fundamental motivation for the proposed strategy, the experimental results show that the proposed strategy has advantages such as fast assembly time and high success rate, but has the disadvantage of unpredictable elapsed time. The reason for having a high variance value for the success time is that the spiral trajectory, which is most commonly used, is used. In this study, I analyze the efficiency of spiral force trajectory and propose an improved force trajectory. The proposed force trajectory reduces the distribution of elapsed time by eliminating the uncertainty in the time required to find a hole. The efficiency of the force trajectory is analyzed numerically, verified through repeated simulations, and verified by the actual experiment with humanoid upper body robot developed by Korea institute of industrial technology.펙인홀 조립은 로봇의 접촉 작업을 대표하는 작업으로, 펙인홀 조립 전략을 연구함으로써 산업 생산 분야의 조립작업에 적용할 수 있다. 펙인홀 조립작업은 일반적으로 펙과 홀 간의 접촉상태를 추정함으로써 이루어진다. 접촉상태를 추정하기 위해 가장 널리 쓰이는 방법은 힘 센서를 사용하는 것인데, 접촉 힘과 모멘트를 측정하여 접촉상태를 추정하는 방식이다. 만약 이러한 센서를 사용하지 않을 수 있다면, 하드웨어 비용과 소프트웨어 연산량 감소 등의 장점이 있음은 자명하다. 본 논문에서는 힘 센서 혹은 수동 컴플라이언스 장치를 사용하지 않는 펙인홀 전략을 제안한다. 홀에 대한 인식 오차 혹은 로봇의 제어 오차를 극복하기 위하여 먼저 펙과 홀의 접촉 가능 상태를 분석하고 로봇의 컴플라이언스 모션을 위한 제어 프레임워크를 디자인한다. 전략은 컴플라이언스 특징에 기반하며 펙에 힘과 모멘트를 생성시킴으로써 조립작업을 수행한다. 펙은 외부환경에 순응함으로써 홀에 삽입된다. 제안한 전략은 낮은 공차를 갖는 펙인홀 실험을 통해서 그 유효성이 검증된다. 펙과 홀을 로봇팔과 외부환경에 각각 고정된 환경에서의 실험, 인간형 로봇핸드를 이용하여 펙을 잡아서 고정된 홀에 삽입하는 실험, 그리고 테이블에 놓인 펙과 홀을 각각 로봇핸드로 파지하여 조립하는 총 세 가지의 실험을 수행하였다. 핸드로 펙을 파지하고 조작하기 위하여, 파지 방법과 핸드를 이용한 물체 조작 알고리즘을 간략히 소개하였다. 제안한 전략의 성능을 실험적으로 분석한 결과, 높은 조립 성공률을 갖는 대신 조립시간이 예측할 수 없는 단점이 나타나 이를 보완하기 위해서 렌치 궤적 또한 제안하였다. 먼저 가장 일반적으로 사용되는 나선 힘 궤적을 이용했을 때 조립 성공시간의 분산이 큰 이유를 확률개념을 이용해 분석하고, 이를 보완하기 위한 부분적 나선 힘 궤적을 제안한다. 제안한 힘 궤적이 나선 힘 궤적에 비해 갖는 성능의 우수성을 증명하기 위하여 수치적 분석, 반복적 시뮬레이션, 그리고 로봇을 이용한 실험을 수행하였다.1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Motivation: Peg-in-Hole Assembly 1 1.2 Contributions of Thesis 2 1.3 Overview of Thesis 3 2 COMPLIANCE BASED STRATEGY 5 2.1 Background & Related Works 5 2.2 Analysis of Peg-in-Hole Procedure 6 2.2.1 Contact Analysis 7 2.2.2 Basic Idea 9 2.3 Peg-in-Hole Strategy 12 2.3.1 Unit Motions 12 2.3.2 State of Strategy 13 2.3.3 Conditions for State Transition 15 2.4 Control Frameworks 18 2.4.1 Control for Compliant Behavior 18 2.4.2 Friction Compensate 20 2.4.3 Control Input for the Strategy 25 2.5 Experiment 29 2.5.1 Experiment Environment 29 2.5.2 Fixed Peg and Fixed Hole 31 2.5.2.1 Experiment Results 31 2.5.2.2 Analysis of Force and Control Gain 36 2.5.3 Peg-in-Hole with Multi Finger Hand 41 2.5.3.1 Object Grasping 42 2.5.3.2 Object In-Hand Manipulation 44 2.5.3.3 Experiment Results 49 2.5.4 With Upper Body Robot 50 2.5.4.1 Peg-in-Hole Procedure 52 2.5.4.2 Kinematics of Grasped Object 54 2.5.4.3 Control Frameworks 54 2.5.4.4 Experiment Results 56 2.6 Discussion 59 2.6.1 Peg-in-Hole Transition 59 2.6.2 Influential Issues 59 3 WRENCH TRAJECTORY 63 3.1 Problem Statement 64 3.1.1 Hole Search Process 64 3.1.2 Spiral Force Trajectory Analysis 66 3.2 Partial Spiral Force Trajectory 70 3.2.1 Force Trajectory with Tilted Posture 70 3.2.2 Probability to Three-point Contact 76 3.3 SIMULATION & EXPERIMENT 78 3.3.1 Simulation 78 3.3.2 Experiment 83 4 CONCLUSIONS 90 Abstract (In Korean) 102Docto

Volumetric error compensation for industrial robots and machine tools

“A more efficient and increasingly popular volumetric error compensation method for machine tools is to compute compensation tables in axis space with tool tip volumetric measurements. However, machine tools have high-order geometric errors and some workspace is not reachable by measurement devices, the compensation method suffers a curve-fitting challenge, overfitting measurements in measured space and losing accuracy around and out of the measured space. Paper I presents a novel method that aims to uniformly interpolate and extrapolate the compensation tables throughout the entire workspace. By using a uniform constraint to bound the tool tip error slopes, an optimal model with consistent compensation capability is constructed. In addition to machine tools, industrial robots, are also becoming popularly used in manufacturing field. However, typical robot volumetric error compensation methods only consider constant errors such as link length and assembly errors while neglecting complicated kinematic errors such as strain wave gearing and out of rotating plane errors. Paper II presents a high-order joint-dependent model which describes both simple and complicated robot kinematic errors. A laser tracker with advantages of rapid data collection and a self-oriented position retroreflector are used for data collection. The experimental results show that nearly 20% of the robot kinematic errors are joint-dependent which are successfully captured by the proposed method. Paper III continues using the high-order joint-dependent robot error model while utilizing a new retroreflector with the ability of measuring robot position and orientation information simultaneously. More than 60% of measurement time is saved. Both position and orientation accuracy are also further improved”--Abstract, page iv

Accurate Bolt Tightening using Model-Free Fuzzy Control for Wind Turbine Hub Bearing Assembly

"In the modern wind turbine industry, one of the core processes is the assembly of the bolt-nut connections of the hub, which requires tightening bolts and nuts to obtain well-distributed clamping force all over the hub. This force deals with nonlinear uncertainties due to the mechanical properties and it depends on the final torque and relative angular position of the bolt/nut connection. This paper handles the control problem of automated bolt tightening processes. To develop a controller, the process is divided into four stages, according to the mechanical characteristics of the bolt/nut connection: a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) with expert knowledge of tightening process and error detection capability is proposed. For each one of the four stages, an individual FLC is designed to address the highly non-linearity of the system and the error scenarios related to that stage, to promptly prevent and avoid mechanical damage. The FLC is implemented and real time executed on an industrial PC and finally validated. Experimental results show the performance of the controller to reach precise torque and angle levels as well as desired clamping force. The capability of error detection is also validated.

Search Methods for Mobile Manipulator Performance Measurement

Mobile manipulators are a potential solution to the increasing need for additional flexibility and mobility in industrial robotics applications. However, they tend to lack the accuracy and precision achieved by fixed manipulators, especially in scenarios where both the manipulator and the autonomous vehicle move simultaneously. This thesis analyzes the problem of dynamically evaluating the positioning error of mobile manipulators. In particular, it investigates the use of Bayesian methods to predict the position of the end-effector in the presence of uncertainty propagated from the mobile platform. Simulations and real-world experiments are carried out to test the proposed method against a deterministic approach. These experiments are carried out on two mobile manipulators - a proof-of-concept research platform and an industrial mobile manipulator - using ROS and Gazebo. The precision of the mobile manipulator is evaluated through its ability to intercept retroreflective markers using a photoelectric sensor attached to the end-effector. Compared to the deterministic search approach, we observed improved interception capability with comparable search times, thereby enabling the effective performance measurement of the mobile manipulator