SBIR Phase I: Smart Robotic Sanding Cells for Composite Parts in High-Mix Applications

SBIR一期项目的广泛影响是提高制造业工人的生活质量，帮助美国制造商在全球市场上保持成本竞争力，并提高制造零件质量的一致性。拟议中的机器人单元将减少工人执行具有人体工程学挑战性的打磨任务的需要，并降低工人在打磨线上受伤的风险。所提出的技术将使人类操作员能够专注于高层次的决策和制造任务的创造性方面，而机器人助手将执行低级乏味的任务。这将允许人类操作员作为一个团队进行更多的合作，从而提高工人的生产力。目前，仅在美国就有3000多家公司从事复合材料制造。由于工人短缺和高劳动力流失率导致交货时间延长，他们中的大多数都面临着挑战。拟议的工作将使制造商能够提高质量并降低成本。此外，它将使制造商减少对人工的依赖，从而缩短零件交货时间，并通过增加或减少机器人单元，轻松地根据需求变化扩大产能。所提出的努力的总体目标是开发一种用于高混合应用的机器人磨砂工艺。该技术将使机器人能够根据任务描述自动生成并安全执行轨迹，从而实现自我编程，并考虑到环境中存在的不确定性。机器人工具将通过快速、安全、高效地执行与复合材料制造相关的磨砂项目，缩短周期时间。将通过整合适当的传感器和工具，开发机器人单元中快速和安全定位工件的算法，以及评估抛光后的表面质量和磨料介质的状态来开发机器人打磨单元。磨砂仪器将为操作人员提供建议，以启动另一个机器人磨砂通道或改变研磨介质。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impacts of this SBIR Phase I project are in improving the quality of life of the manufacturing workers, helping U.S. manufacturers remain cost-competitive in the global market, and improving consistency in the quality of the manufactured parts. The proposed robotic cells will reduce the need for workers to perform ergonomically challenging sanding tasks and reduce the risk of worker injuries on sanding lines. The proposed technologies will enable the human operators to focus on high-level decision making and the creative aspects of the manufacturing tasks, while the robotic assistants will perform the low-level tedious tasks. This would allow human operators to collaborate more as a team and thereby improve worker productivity. Currently, there are more than 3000 companies in the U.S. alone doing composite fabrication. Most of them face challenges due to a shortage of workers and high labor churn leading to longer delivery times. The proposed work will enable manufacturers to improve quality and lower costs. Moreover, it will enable manufacturers to reduce time to part delivery by reducing reliance on human labor and easily scale production capacity with changes in demand by adding or removing robotic cells.The overall goal of the proposed effort is to develop a robotic sanding process for high-mix applications. The technology will enable robots to program themselves by automatically generating and safely executing trajectories based on the task description, accounting for the uncertainties present in the environment. The robotic tools will reduce cycle time by fast execution of safe and efficient execution of sanding project related to the fabrication of composite materials. A robotic sanding cell will be developed by incorporating appropriate sensors and tools, developing algorithms for fast and safe workpiece localization in the robotic cell, and assessing the post-sanding surface quality and the state of the abrasive media. The sanding instrumentation will provide recommendations to the human operator for initiating another robotic sanding pass or changing the abrasive media.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.