On-the-Fly Control Design of Modular Robot Manipulators

Giusti, Andrea; Althoff, Matthias

doi:10.1109/tcst.2017.2707336

Cited by 20 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Last, the control unit automatically generated code, so that the motion control worked out of the box after assembly. This work considers serial kinematics and builds on our previous work in (54) for controller synthesis; we extended it for collision checking, selfverification, and composition synthesis in this work. Because of the previous work in this area, we kept this section concise, and refer to the Supplementary Materials for detailed information.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effortless creation of safe robots from modules through self-programming and self-verification

et al. 2019

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Industrial robots cannot be reconfigured to optimally fulfill a given task and often have to be caged to guarantee human safety. Consequently, production processes are meticulously planned so that they last for long periods to make automation affordable. However, the ongoing trend toward mass customization and small-scale manufacturing requires purchasing new robots on a regular basis to cope with frequently changing production. Modular robots are a natural answer: Robots composed of standardized modules can be easily reassembled for new tasks, can be quickly repaired by exchanging broken modules, and are cost-effective by mass-producing standard modules usable for a large variety of robot types. Despite these advantages, modular robots have not yet left research laboratories because an expert must reprogram each new robot after assembly, rendering reassembly impractical. This work presents our set of interconnectable modules (IMPROV), which programs and verifies the safety of assembled robots themselves. Experiments show that IMPROV robots retained the same control performance as nonmodular robots, despite their reconfigurability. With respect to human-robot coexistence, our user study shows a reduction of robot idle time by 36% without compromising on safety using our self-verification concept compared with current safety standards. We believe that by using self-programming and self-verification, modular robots can transform current automation practices.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effortless creation of safe robots from modules through self-programming and self-verification

et al. 2019

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“…This directly leads to research questions and challenges concerning the fundamentally necessary capabilities for automated module discovery [22], [23], auto-generation and verification of complete and accurate kinematic and dynamic models, as well as automatic controller generation and tuning [24], [25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Plug-and-Work Reconfigurable Cobot

Romiti

Malzahn

Kashiri

et al. 2022

IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatron.

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The ongoing trend from mass-produced to masscustomized products with batch-sizes as small as a single unit has highlighted the need for highly adaptable robotic systems with low down-time for maintenance. To address these demands, this work proposes the development of a novel reconfigurable collaborative robot (cobot), which has the potential to open up many new scenarios within the rapidly emerging flexible manufacturing environments. As the technological contribution, we present a complete hard-and software architecture for a quickly reconfigurable EtherCAT-based robot. This novel approach allows to automatically reconstruct the topology of different robot structures, composed of a set of body modules, each of which represents an EtherCAT slave. As the theoretical contribution, we propose a method to obtain in an automatic way the kinematic and dynamic model of the robot and store it in URDF format as soon as the physical robot is assembled or reconfigured. The method also automatically reshapes a generic optimization-based controller to be instantly used after reconfiguration. While the paper focuses on reconfigurable manipulators, the proposed concept can support arbitrary serial kinematic tree-like configurations. We demonstrate the contributions with examples of: (a) how the topology of the robot is reconstructed and the URDF model is generated, (b) a Cartesian task application for a cobot built with the basic modules, demonstrating the quick reconfigurabilty of the system from a 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) robot to a 5-DOF robot, in order to satisfy new workspace requirements.

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“…Similar method is shown in [19,20,21] by using graph theory, defining the Assembly Incidence Matrix (AIM) for the connections of the modules and calibrated using POE formula. An extension to standard DH parameters has been presented in [22,23] for the automatic modeling of kinematics and dynamics. FEM based method for automatic modeling of modular robots is presented in [24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Optimal Architectural Design for Unconventional Modular Reconfigurable Manipulation System

Dogra

Padhee

Singla

2020

Journal of Mechanical Design

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Modular and Reconfigurable manipulators have gained popularity especially in the service sector, where the use of customized configurations has increased. Adaptable modular designs have come into advances in achieving the required configuration of a robotic manipulator. As reported in the literature, various designs of the modules mainly with conventional configurations are presented and a few are reported with unconventional adjustments. To cater the non-repetitive applications, this paper presents an optimal architectural design for unconventional parameters for customized reconfigurability. This lighter and easier to connect version is also applicable to n-DoF and unconventional robotic parameters. Architecture Prominent Sectioning (APS) strategy is proposed which assumes an architecture as a set of point masses and optimally relocate components with respect to the minimization of the joint torques. Modules are considered to be 3-D printables using poly-lactic acid (PLA), a thermoplastic material, and thus light in weight. The new modular architecture design is validated through the assemblage of conventional/unconventional configurations using two types of modules namely Heavy(H) and Light(L). Along with that, worst torque analysis for the different configurations has been done in order to provide a strategy for assembly combinations. A comparative study is presented based upon the payload to the manipulator weight ratio, involving other reported architectures.

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On-the-Fly Control Design of Modular Robot Manipulators

Cited by 20 publications

References 33 publications

Effortless creation of safe robots from modules through self-programming and self-verification

Effortless creation of safe robots from modules through self-programming and self-verification

Toward a Plug-and-Work Reconfigurable Cobot

An Optimal Architectural Design for Unconventional Modular Reconfigurable Manipulation System

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