On Cognitive Robot Woodworking in SMErobotics

This paper details and discusses work performed at the woodworking SME Mivelaz Techniques Bois SA within the SMErobotics FP7 project. The aim is to improve non-expert handling of the cell by introduction of cognitive abilities in the robot system. Three areas are considered; intuitive programming, process adaptation and system integration. Proposed cognitive components are described together with experiments performed

On the Integration of Skilled Robot Motions for Productivity in Manufacturing

Robots used in manufacturing today are tailored to their tasks by system integration based on expert knowledge concerning both production and machine control. For upcoming new generations of even more flexible robot solutions, in applications such as dexterous assembly, the robot setup and programming gets even more challenging. Reuse of solutions in terms of parameters, controls, process tuning, and of software modules in general then gets increasingly important. There has been valuable progress within reuse of automation solutions when machines comply with standards and behave according to nominal models. However, more flexible robots with sensor-based manipulation skills and congnitive functions for human inteaction are far too complex to manage, and solutions are rarely reusable since knowledge is either implicit in imperative software or not captured in machine readable form. We propose techniques that build on existing knowledge by converting structured data into an RDF-based knowledge base. By enhancements of industrial control systems and available engineering tools, such knowledge can be gradually extended as part of the interaction during the definition of the robot task

On cognitive robot woodworking in SMErobotics

This paper details and discusses work performed at the woodworking SME Mivelaz Techniques Bois SA within the SMErobotics FP7 project. The aim is to improve non-expert handling of the cell by introduction of cognitive abilities in the robot system. Three areas are considered; intuitive programming, process adaptation and system integration. Proposed cognitive components are described together with experiments performed

On the Programming and System Integration of Robots in Flexible Manufacturing

Advanced manufacturing technologies and programmable machines such as industrial robots are used to increase productivity and quality for competitiveness on a global market. Development of increasingly flexible manufacturing systems has resulted in an increasing importance of software aspects, both on a system level and for efficient interaction with human operators. Trends toward providing customized products increase the need for flexibility, which implies a need to build modular systems that are flexible enough to handle frequent changes in production operations and product designs. The objective of the research presented in this thesis is to improve the flexibility of industrial robot software when used as a component in flexible and reconfigurable industrial automation solutions. Contributions are made in four areas; First, high performance industrial motion control is enhanced to utilize arbitrary sensors in task definition and execution. Results include an extensible task programming language, allowing for flexible integration of sensor motion in established robot languages. Second, flexibility of the robot structure itself is studied, with an emphasis on software tool configuration support for a highly modular parallel kinematic robot featuring stiff motions and large workspace. Third, several operator interaction techniques are evaluted for fast and easy robot setup. Novel interaction devices and use of sensors bring new opportunities to improve robot setup procedures. Finally, and also pointing out future research directions, semantic web techniques are explored for use within automatic generation of user interfaces from product and process data and for more efficient integration of off-line engineering tools in the workflow for online task generation. The findings are based on a variety of industrial prototypes and case studies, with novel software solutions ranging from low-level device interfaces to high-level semantic integration. The experienced resulting enhancements of flexibility, usability and modularity are encouraging

On the Scalability of Visualization in Manufacturing

Computer graphics plays an important role in modern engineering of manufacturing systems, both during design using virtual engineering environments and also as part of user interfaces to various machines. Existing and emerging systems today make use of software components, usually providing a graphical view to the user. In manufacturing, 3D graphics is desirable to visualize geometries of equipment and workpieces, sometimes also via small dedicated user interfaces. The established industrial technology does, however, neither scale down very well to such small platforms, nor scale up to safe operation of large systems. We put forward a notion of executable visualization and propose a solution based on the Java platform, using Java3D for 3D visualization in combination with VRML for external representation. Fully implemented prototypes including both real and virtual industrial robots, and industrial case studies, have verified the scalability which appears to be uniqu

YuMi low-level motion guidance using the Julia programming language and Externally Guided Motion Research Interface

A generic robot library written in the Julia programming language is presented. A bridging framework, also presented, exposes the ABB externally guided motion research interface (EGMRI) low-level robot motion correction interface to the Julia language and other entities, such as Python and ROS. A usage example on Julia contact force estimation on an ABB YuMi robot concludes the document

A Prototype Robot Speech Interface with Multimodal Feedback

Speech recognition is available on ordinary personal computers and is starting to appear in standard software applications. A known problem with speech interfaces is their integration into current graphical user interfaces. This paper reports on a prototype developed for studying integration of speech into graphical interfaces aimed towards programming of industrial robot arms. The aim of the prototype is to develop a speech system for designing robot trajectories that would fit well with current CAD paradigms

TOWARD ONTOLOGIES AND SERVICES FOR ASSISTING INDUSTRIAL ROBOT SETUP AND INSTRUCTION

Industrial robot, ontology, web services, multimodal dialogue. Achieving rapid, intuitive, and error-free robot setup and instruction is a challenge. We present our work towards an assistive infrastructure for robot setup and instruction that attempts to address it. In this paper, we describe the ongoing development of a system that automatically generates multimodal dialogue interaction from product and process ontologies. The prototype currently generates two modalities, digital paper and spoken dialogue.

Variable Time Delays in Visual Servoing and Task Execution Control

We study an image-based visual servoing system implemented on a non-dedicatednetwork with non-deterministic computationalnodes. A problem is thattime delays aretypically non-deterministic and variable and may causesignificant degradation of control system performance, stability androbustness if not compensated for.Another problem is thepresence of noise due to information loss and measurement errors inthe image and vision processing part of the loop also resultingin decreased control performance.This paper focuses on an image plane linear predictionstrategy implemented using time-stamped data and a nonuniformly updating Kalman filter tocompensate for time delays and noise. Control performance isexperimentally verified by presenting prediction errormeasurements from an image-based visual servoing experiment ofgripping a moving object using a 6-DOF industrial robot anduncalibrated cameras