Advanced teleoperation and control system for industrial robots based on augmented virtuality and haptic feedback

Claudia González,J Ernesto Solanes,Adolfo Muñoz,Luis Gracia,Vicent Girbés-Juan,Josep Tornero

doi:10.1016/j.jmsy.2021.02.013

Abstract

There are some industrial tasks that are still mainly performed manually by human workers due to their complexity, which is the case of surface treatment operations (such as sanding, deburring, finishing, grinding, polishing, etc.) used to repair defects. This work develops an advanced teleoperation and control system for industrial robots in order to assist the human operator to perform the mentioned tasks. On the one hand, the controlled robotic system provides strength and accuracy, holding the tool, keeping the right tool orientation and guaranteeing a smooth approach to the workpiece. On the other hand, the advanced teleoperation provides security and comfort to the user when performing the task. In particular, the proposed teleoperation uses augmented virtuality (i.e., a virtual world that includes non-modeled real-world data) and haptic feedback to provide the user an immersive virtual experience when remotely teleoperating the tool of the robot system to treat arbitrary regions of the workpiece surface. The method is illustrated with a car body surface treatment operation, although it can be easily extended to other surface treatment applications or even to other industrial tasks where the human operator may benefit from robotic assistance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown with several experiments using a 6R robotic arm. Moreover, a comparison of the performance obtained manually by an expert and that obtained with the proposed method has also been conducted in order to show the suitability of the proposed approach.

Highlights

IntroductionSurface treatment tasks used to repair defects are complex processes
The remote human-robot interaction (HRI) will allow to cooperatively solve the task at hand in synergy, i.e., the human user provides flexibility to adapt to complex operations, whereas the robot system provides precision and strength
It is assumed that the path associated with the profiling task is given, depicted in the virtual car body surface and used by the operator as a visual reference to teleoperate the robot

Summary

Introduction

Surface treatment tasks used to repair defects are complex processes. In the automotive industry, surface finishing requires the dexterity of human hands and an intelligent use of feedback, which human experts obtain by touching and looking at the defects on the workpiece surface during the treatment [1]. The procedure required to repair a defect may vary during its repair due to the condition of the surface (e.g., defects on a car body surface recently painted [2]). Some automatic systems can be found in the literature dealing with surface treatment tasks in the automotive industry [3, 4], in most of the factories surface treatment tasks to repair car body surface defects are still carried out manually by experts. The main reason for this is the difficulty of automating this process if the finishing tool does not perform consistently or if there is no possibility to check the result [1]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion