In robotized industrial scenarios, the need for efficiency and flexibility is increasing, especially when tasks must be executed in dangerous environments and/or require the simultaneous manipulation of dangerous/fragile objects by multiple heterogeneous robots. However, the underlying hardware and software architecture is typically characterized by constraints imposed by the robots’ manufacturers, which complicates their integration and deployment. This work aims to demonstrate that widely used algorithms for robotics, such as interaction control, can be made independent of the hardware architecture, abstraction level, and functionality provided by the low-level proprietary controllers. As a consequence, a robot-independent control framework can be devised, which reduces the time and effort needed to configure the robotic system and adapt it to changing requirements. Robot-agnostic interaction controllers are implemented on top of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and made freely available to the robotic community. Experiments were performed on the Universal Robots UR10 research robot, the Comau Smart-Six industrial robot, and their digital twins, so as to demonstrate that the proposed control algorithms can be easily deployed on different hardware and simulators without reprogramming.

Aerospace production volumes have increased over time and robotic solutions have been progressively introduced in the aeronautic assembly lines to achieve high-quality standards, high production rates, flexibility and cost reduction. Robotic workcells are sometimes characterized by robots mounted on slides to increase the robot workspace. The slide introduces an additional degree of freedom, making the system kinematically redundant, but this feature is rarely used to enhance performances. The paper proposes a new concept in trajectory planning, that exploits the redundancy to satisfy additional requirements. A dynamic programming technique is adopted, which computes optimized trajectories, minimizing or maximizing the performance indices of interest. The use case is defined on the LABOR (Lean robotized AssemBly and cOntrol of composite aeRostructures) project which adopts two cooperating six-axis robots mounted on linear axes to perform assembly operations on fuselage panels. Considering the needs of this workcell, unnecessary robot movements are minimized to increase safety, the mechanical stiffness is maximized to increase stability during the drilling operations, collisions are avoided, while joint limits and the available planning time are respected. Experiments are performed in a simulation environment, where the optimal trajectories are executed, highlighting the resulting performances and improvements with respect to non-optimized solutions.