Improving the sequence of robotic tasks with freedom of execution

Abstract

An industrial robot's workflow typically consists of a set of tasks that have to be repeated multiple times. A task could be, for example, welding a seam or cutting a hole. The efficiency with which the robot performs the sequence of tasks is an important factor in most production domains. In most practical scenarios, the majority of tasks have a certain freedom of execution. For example, closed-contour welding task can often be started and finished at any point of the curve. In this paper we propose a method that is able to automatically improve the given sequence of robotic tasks that allow for a certain freedom in (i) the position of the starting point along the curve, (ii) the orientation of the end-effector and (iii) the robot configuration. The proposed approach does not depend on the production domain and could be combined with any algorithm for constructing the initial task sequence. We evaluate the algorithm on a realistic case study and show that it could significantly improve the production time on the test instances from the cutting-deburring domain.978-1-4799-6934-0/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE

A review of cutting path algorithms for laser cutters

“…T Lee and Kwon [57] G A P , A Elbassioni et al [58] Approx. T Gentilini et al [59] MINLP T Alatartsev et al [60] H A Alatartsev et al [61] H A Alatartsev and Ortmeier [62] H A Vicencio et al [63] GA A, GTSPN the paper takes common cut constraints into account directly or indirectly. Arkin and Hassin [9] introduce the TSP-N (although they call it the Geometric Covering Salesman Problem) and present several approximation algorithms for simple cases.…”

“…However, as in [60], only ellipsoid areas are considered. Alatartsev and Ortmeier [62] then apply this approach to an actual case where additional postoptimization occurs once the task sequence is known in order to adapt the path to a robot path.…”

Fuzzy PID control method of deburring industrial robots

“…The end-effector orientation and position freedom, as well as the robot configuration, greatly influences the cost of supporting movement [14]. The design and implementation of a platform for rapid external sensor integration into an industrial robot control system was presented [1].…”