Enhanced Flexibility and Reusability Through State Machine Based Architectures for Multisensor Intelligent Robotics

Abstract

This paper presents a state machine based architecture which enhances flexibility and reusability of industrial robots, more concretely dual-arm multisensor robots. The proposed architecture, in addition to allowing absolute control of the execution, eases the programming of new applications by increasing the reusability of the developed modules. Through an easy-to-use graphical user interface, operators are able to create, modify, reuse and maintain industrial processes increasing the flexibility of the cell. Moreover, the proposed approach is applied in a real use case in order to demonstrate its capabilities and feasibility in industrial environments. A comparative analysis is presented for evaluating presented approach versus traditional robot programming techniques.

A case study of automated dual-arm manipulation in industrial applications

“…In is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) 5 [7]. The robot is connected to ROS through a bridge developed by JSK (Jouhou System Kougaku) Laboratory at The University of Tokyo 6 , in collaboration with Tokyo Opensource Robotics Kyokai Association (TORK) 7 and Tecnalia 8 . OpenRTM 9 , developed by AIST, was used as a middleware.…”

“…In addition, the proposed software architecture is aimed to facilitate the implementation of new applications by increasing the re-usability of the developed modules. Through an easyto-use graphical user interface (see [6] for additional details on the software architecture and interface), operators are able to create, modify, reuse and maintain industrial processes, thus increasing the flexibility of the cell.…”

“…As shown in the Fig. 3, the architecture is composed of three layers, namely: (i) application development layer, which allows to create, load and modify processes; (ii) execution engine layer, to execute a broad portfolio of primitives and skills; and (iii) robotic interface layer, providing the necessary interfaces and controllers for different robots [6]. Regarding the aforementioned reusability and flexibility, the application development layer allows the selection of previously developed operations.…”

“…Then, Section III presents the software architecture being used. In parallel to the work presented in this paper, we are developing several approaches (skillbased programming, CAD-based programming, ...) to enable moderately qualified operators to easily specify a manipulation task [6]. Here, we focus on dual-arm motion planning, which is one of the key issues to be solved in the context of this case study.…”