User-Friendly Programming of Flexible Assembly Applications with Collaborative Robots

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework to make the programming of cobots faster, user-friendly and flexible for assembly tasks. The work focusses on an industrial case of a small (<10kg) air compressor and investigates the technologies that can be used to automate this task with Human-Robot collaboration. To this end, the framework takes a radically different approach at the motion stack level and integrates the cobot with a constraint-based robot programming paradigm. Additionally, the framework takes inputs from the operator via speech recognition and computer vision. An implementation is made and the results show that this framework is a promising approach for the overall goal of achieving flexible assembly in the factories by making robot programming faster and intuitive.