Collaborative Robot Systems

            The widespread use of robots in flexible factories (i.e., factory environments subject to high product turnover, short production runs, and high variability in equipment configurations) is limited by the robots’ inability to safely collaborate with one another and with human labor. The robots’ incapacity to coordinate, communicate, and understand their actions, roles, and task statuses thus decreases the robots’ usefulness in applications where tasks cannot be completed by a single robot. This limitation is driven by both the absence of tools and protocols needed for describing collaborative functions, and the complete lack of metrics for assessing how we expect robots to work with other robots and with humans.

 The Performance of Collaborative Robot Systems project will provide the methods, protocols, and metrics necessary to evaluate the collaborative capabilities of robot systems, and will use a task-driven decomposition of manufacturing processes to assess and assure the safety and effectiveness of human-robot and robot-robot collaborative teams toward the manufacturing performance objectives. This collection of methods, protocols, and metrics will enable end-users to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of integrating collaborative robots into their production processes, impacting both large-scale companies designing and re purposing fully autonomous manufacturing workflows, and smaller companies looking to begin automating existing processes performed largely by manual labor.

Multiple robots are programmed to complete a complex kitting, part transfer, and assembly operation.  The work cell consists of five robots from different manufacturers, and are controlled using software for coordination such that they all operate in the same coordinate system.  Parts are picked from feeders and placed into a kit tray.  That kit tray is then transferred to a second work cell via hand-offs between robots.  At the second work cell, the parts are then removed from the kit tray and physically mated to form a final assembly. Once the assembly is completed, the part is returned to the kit tray, and returned to the first work cell, where it is removed, and the kit tray is reset.  The process then restarts with a new assembly.