Robotic Handling of Liquids with Spilling Avoidance: A Constraint-Based Control Approach

Abstract

Handling liquids with spilling avoidance is a topic of interest for a broad range of fields, both in industry and in service robotic applications. In this paper we present a new control architecture for motion planning of industrial robots, able to tackle the problem of liquid transfer with sloshing control. We do not focus on a complete sloshing suppression, but we show how to enforce an anti spilling constraint. This less conservative approach allows to impose higher accelerations, reducing motion time. A constraint-based approach, amenable to an Online implementation, has been developed. The proposed controller generates trajectories in real time, in order to follow a reference path, while being compliant to the spilling avoidance constraint. The approach has been validated on a 6 degree of freedom industrial ABB robot.