Accurate and versatile automation of industrial kitting operations with SkiROS

The low automation level of industrial manufacturing processes, in conjunction with the limited research in the field of object manipulation for placing tasks, rise the need for adaptive and accurate industrial robotic systems that can manipulate a variety of objects in an uncertain environment. We deal with those issues by providing insights into two modules of a skilled-based architecture, the SkiROS. Those modules are applied on the placing part of an industrial kitting operation and can lead to versatile perception of the environment and the accurate placing of objects in confined areas. We evaluate both modules in terms of accuracy, execution time and success rate in various setups of the environment. Also we evaluate the whole kitting pipeline – including the proposed modules – as a unit in terms of repeatability and execution time. The results show that the proposed system is capable to both accurately localize the kitting box and place the object in its narrow compartments

SkiROS—A skill-based robot control platform on top of ROS

The development of cognitive robots in ROS still lacks the support of some key components: a knowledge integration framework and a framework for autonomous mission execution. In this research chapter, we will discuss our skill-based platform SkiROS, that was developed on top of ROS in order to organize robot knowledge and its behavior. We will show how SkiROS offers the possibility to integrate different functionalities in form of skill ‘apps’ and how SkiROS offers services for integrating these skill-apps into a consistent workspace. Furthermore, we will show how these skill-apps can be automatically executed based on autonomous, goal-directed task planning. SkiROS helps the developers to program and port their high-level code over a heterogeneous range of robots, meanwhile the minimal Graphical User Interface (GUI) allows non-expert users to start and supervise the execution. As an application example, we present how SkiROS was used to vertically integrate a robot into the manufacturing system of PSA Peugeot-Citroën. We will discuss the characteristics of the SkiROS architecture which makes it not limited to the automotive industry but flexible enough to be used in other application areas as well. SkiROS has been developed on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and ROS indigo and it can be downloaded at https://github.com/frovida/skiros. A demonstration video is also available at https://youtu.be/mo7UbwXW5W0