The World Robot Summit (WRS) is a robotic 'challenge and exposition' organized by the Japanese government to accelerate social implementation, research and development of robots working in realistic daily life, society, and industrial fields. In this paper, we introduce a robot competition of the Industrial Robotics Category of the WRS, called 'Assembly Challenge', which is organized by the WRS Industrial Robotics Competition Committee in order to promote the development of the next-generation production systems that can respond to new production demands in agile and lean manners. Prior to the main competition in 2020, a pre-competition was held in 2018 with 16 participating teams from around the world. In this paper, we introduce the contents and results of this pre-competition, analyze the results, and give a perspective for the 2020 main competition.

In a robotic cell, assembly robots have to grasp parts in various shapes robustly and accurately even under some uncertainties in the initial poses of the parts. For this purpose, it is necessary to develop a universal robotic hand and robust grasping strategies, i.e. finger motions that can achieve planned grasping robustly against the initial pose uncertainty of parts. In this paper, we propose a methodology to plan robust grasping strategies of a universal robotic hand for assembling parts in various shapes. In our approach, parts are aligned toward planned configurations during grasping actions, and the robustness of grasping strategies is analyzed and evaluated based on pushing operation analysis. As an application example, we plan robust grasping strategies for assembling a three-dimensional puzzle, and experimentally verify the robustness and effectiveness of the planned strategies for this assembly task.

In a robotic cell production system, an assembly robot has to grasp various parts with a planned pose relative to its end effector robustly from the initial poses even with some uncertainties. For this purpose, it is necessary to design robust grasping strategy.In this paper, we propose a method to simulate multi-fingered hand grasping as a tool for designing robust grasping strategy. Acknowledging that pushing is the most primitive operation when a hand grasps a part on a flat floor, pushing operations are analyzed under the quasi-static condition. Based on the analysis, it is possible to simulate multi-fingered hand grasping and find a permissible error region of the object pose from which a planned grasping is guaranteed. Some examples of the simulation and permissible initial error regions are shown. It is also shown that experimentally obtained permissible initial error regions are almost identical to the theoretical one.

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