Integrated Visual/Force Servoing Control of Robotic Manufacturing Systems

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The work proposed in this application for the next five years builds on my previous research on visual servoing control of robotic manufacturing systems which aims at increasing the accuracy and speed of robot positioning. Several advanced control strategies have been developed to achieve the goal in the robotic manufacturing systems. However, in addition to high precision positioning, the industry is also looking for safe and efficient control strategies that allow the robotic system performing tracking, positioning and grasping tasks etc. in an unstructured environment. Such control strategies can keep the robotic system up and running for the long haul and can avoid any damage when the robot crash occurred. Currently, the operator has to shut down production and try to fix the damages. For the high end manufacturing systems especially in aerospace industry, the crash will result in tooling damage and significant loss of the production time. For instance, in the advanced fiber placement (AFP) machine, the collision between the fiber place head and the mandrel will cost up to ten thousands dollar in repairing the roller or other parts in the fiber placement head. Although some passive solutions have been used in the industry such as installing a crash protection device between the end effector and the tool or designing a good motion planning controller, an active prevention solution that integrates the vision, force and position signals and provides the safe and efficient control strategies to the robotic manufacturing systems are sought by the industry. A lot of research has been devoted to vision and force control in the robotic control community. However, few approaches focus on dealing with the collision and crash in the real industrial manufacturing processes. Therefore, a new practical multi-sensor based control framework for collision avoidance is to be built to meet the demand from robotic manufacturing industry.