Assembly Planning and Task Planning — Two Prerequisites for Automated Robot Programming

Abstract

This contribution aims to present a complete process chain starting from the initial specification of assembly tasks via assembly sequence planning, all the way through task planning and finally task execution. It demonstrates how robot programs can be generated automatically from CAD data. For assembly sequence planning, a new assembly planning system has been developed and evaluated with several representative assembly groups. As an interface to robot control systems, manipulation primitives have been introduced. Manipulation primitive nets are an appropriate way to deal with uncertainties occurring during assembly task execution. This contribution introduces a new approach, demonstrating how to generate manipulation primitive nets automatically. Firstly, CAD data are segmented into surface primitives. A contact formation graph based on topological contacts between such surface primitives is generated afterwards. Based on these contact formation graphs, manipulation primitive nets can be successfully derived. The concept for automated robot programming presented in this contribution is supported by real experiments of actual assembly tasks.KeywordsAssembly SequenceContact FormationAssembly TaskRobot ProgramRobot TaskThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.