An ontology to enable optimized task partitioning in human-robot collaboration for warehouse kitting operations

Abstract

Collaborative teams of human operators and mobile ground robots are becoming popular in manufacturing plants to assist humans with a lot of the repetitive tasks such as the packing of related objects into different units, an operation known as kitting. In this paper, we present an ontology to provide a unified representation of all kitting-related tasks, which are decomposed into atomic actions that are either computational involving sensing, perception, planning, and control, or physical involving actuation and manipulation. The ontology is then used in a stochastic integer linear program for optimum partitioning of the atomic tasks between the robots and humans. Preliminary experiments on a single robot, single human case yield promising results where the kitting operations are completed with lower durations and manipulation failure rates using human-robot partnership versus just the human or only the robot. This success is achieved by the robot seeking human assistance for visual perception tasks while performing the other tasks primarily on its own.

Applicability of Human-Robot Collaboration to Small Batch Production

“…For small production volume, some manufacturing operations (e.g., machine loading and unloading, part inspection, part cleaning, bin picking, kitting) are largely done manually [1]. In contrast, a lot of these operations are performed by robots in mass production lines, such as in the automotive industry [2,3].…”

Kitting in the Wild through Online Domain Adaptation

“…Robotic kitting and bin picking are similar and well known problems. Several methods have been proposed to solve these problems by either using specialized setups [3], highlevel frameworks [2], [4] or using human-robot collaboration [1], [5]. Liu et al in [3] use a customized camera for extracting edges of the objects in a bin and then using shapematching to detect objects and estimating their poses.…”

“…Robots are currently being used in variety of tasks such as machine loading, part inspection, bin picking, kitting, and assembly. In this work, we consider the task of kitting which is the process of grouping related parts such as gathering components of a personal computer (PC) into one bin for assembly [1]. The kitting task requires the recognition of the parts in the environment, the ability to pick objects from the bins and placing them at the correct location [2].…”

“…and the ERC project RoboExNovo (M. M., B.C.). 1 M. Mancini Fig. 1: Our approach for performing kitting in arbitrary conditions.…”

Dynamic distribution of assembly tasks in a collaborative workcell of humans and robots

“…For small production volumes, some manufacturing operations (e.g., machine loading and unloading, part inspection, part cleaning, bin picking, kitting) are largely done manually [6]. In contrast, a lot of these operations are performed by robots in mass production lines, such as in the automotive industry [7,8].…”