Non-nominal path planning for robust robotic assembly

• In manufacturing and assembly processes it is important, in terms of time and money, to verify the feasi-bility of the operations at the design stage and at early production planning. To achieve that, verificationin a virtual environment is often performed by using methods such as path planning and simulation ofdimensional variation. Lately, these areas have gained interest both in industry and academia, however,they are almost always treated as separate activities, leading to unnecessary tight tolerances and on-lineadjustments.To resolve this, we present a novel procedure based on the interaction between path planning tech-niques and variation simulation. This combined tool is able to compute robust assembly paths forindustrial robots, i.e. paths less sensitive to the geometrical variation existing in the robot links, in itscontrol system, and in the environment. This may lead to increased productivity and may limit errorsources. The main idea to improve robustness is to enable robots to avoid motions in areas with highvariation, preferring instead low variation zones. The method is able to deal with the different geometricalvariation due to the different robot kinematic configurations. Computing variation might be a computa-tionally expensive task or variation data might be unavailable in the entire state space, therefore threedifferent ways to estimate variation are also proposed and compared. An industrial test case from theautomotive industry is successfully studied and the results are presented.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Quality assurance

Path planning

Robotics

Assembly

Dimensional control

Computer aided manufacturing

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art (ämneskategori)

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