Executing Elementary Assembly Operations by a Two-Arm Robot

Abstract

This paper presents a component of the on-line tasklevel planning system of the mobile, two-arm robot KAMRO, which is being developed at our Institute. This component generates sequences of explicit robot motions for achieving the goals of elementary assembly operations, and supervises their execution by the real-time robot control system, according to implicitly specified pick-and-place operations scheduled on higher levels of the on-line planning system. This paper addresses the on-line path planning of the two-arm manipulator system for both independent tasks and two-arm cooperations. For parallel execution of independent tasks, collision-free paths are planned using a 2D geometric model and are based on a scheduling concept in consideration of the swept regions by the robot arms during their motions. The on-line path planning for two-arm cooperations for exchanging and regrasping assembly parts incorporates an off-line connectivity analysis, avoiding both collisions and kinematic restrictions.