A circuit-breaker use-case operated by a humanoid in aircraft manufacturing

Abstract

Abstract-Automation of large-scale aircraft manufacturing with wheeled or embedded platforms requires costly changes of the manufacturing process and the environment. Humanoid robots could address this issue. We present a use-case of HRP-4 humanoid operating circuit-breakers. We show the feasibility of using visual feedback and force control in an integrated and unified multi-contact and multimodal task space quadratic programming (QP) whole-body control framework to enable HRP-4 to perform the task. We discuss the experimental results and outline the limitations of the current platform design and control implementation.

Humanoid Robots in Aircraft Manufacturing: The Airbus Use Cases

“…There are encouraging results as for the software architecture (the HRP-4 is fully open-source code). We were able to achieve, with exactly the same controller, the same task templates and the same methodology, two other use-cases that we do not report here, since they are part of another project and they were not demonstrated in-situ: torqueing in multicontact dynamic motion and circuit breaker operations in [3], but without the markers, see Fig. 14.…”

“…Indeed, the force required for a given task has great influence on the configuration to be taken. Moreover, the task to be made would suggest additional contacts to be established not only to increase the equilibrium robustness, but also to increase the operational force by creating additional kinematic loops [3] and exploiting internal force distribution.…”

Nut fastening with a humanoid robot

“…This work highlights the importance of the sensors (force, vision) in the achievement of precise tasks with robots that were not designed for that purpose, a point that is quite new in the humanoid research community. It also raises the question of robust vision when it comes to both humanoid robots with their embedded cameras and objects with size of under 1cm, see the circuit-breaker case in [18]. We will look deeper into this in the future.…”

Towards Shared Autonomy Applications using Whole-body Control Formulations of Locomanipulation

“…While traditionally quadratic programming-based formulations are chosen for whole-body control in legged platforms, e.g. in [17], the comparatively small size of a mobile manipulation problem (9-17 DoF) allows us to leverage nonlinear optimization to include much more expressive cost and constraint terms. An overview of how this solver is embedded into the full framework is shown in Figure 3.…”