Robot companion for industrial process monitoring based on virtual fixtures

Sita, Enrico; Thomessen, Trygve; Pipe, Anthony G.; Dailami, Farid; Studley, Matthew

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. In this paper, the use of a monitoring companion is proposed to more efficiently collect the process information during the tuning of industrial systems, and therefore to assist the system integrator in the optimization process for complex robotic installations. The monitoring companion consists of an industrial manipulator (monitoring robot) and a Unity-ROS framework for controlling it. We discuss in this paper the features that allow the solution to be re-used in different industrial application thanks to its compatibility with ROS. In particular, we present the approach based on admittance virtual fixtures and how we use such abstraction to track a moving target (it could be the end-effector of another robot for example). Moreover, the concept of varying compliance is introduced as a way to influence the motion of the monitoring robot on the virtual fixtures in the presence of obstacles. The experiments have been conducted in simulation as well as on real hardware to test the accuracy of the system at respecting the virtual fixtures with both a static and a moving monitoring target, although in the current implementation the varying compliance was not included in the experiments.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Proceedings: IECON 2018 - 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society
• Start Date: Oct 21, 2018
• End Date: Oct 23, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Jul 16, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Dec 31, 2018
• Publication Date: Dec 26, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jan 8, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 8, 2019
• Pages: 6051-6056
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/IECON.2018.8591105
• Keywords: monitoring, service robots, end effectors, task analysis, admittance, tracking
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/855470
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.ezproxy.uwe.ac.uk/document/8591105
• Additional Information: Additional Information : (c) 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.; Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : IECON 2018 - 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society