Improving the sequence of robotic tasks with freedom of execution

Abstract

An industrial robot's workflow typically consists of a set of tasks that have to be repeated multiple times. A task could be, for example, welding a seam or cutting a hole. The efficiency with which the robot performs the sequence of tasks is an important factor in most production domains. In most practical scenarios, the majority of tasks have a certain freedom of execution. For example, closed-contour welding task can often be started and finished at any point of the curve. In this paper we propose a method that is able to automatically improve the given sequence of robotic tasks that allow for a certain freedom in (i) the position of the starting point along the curve, (ii) the orientation of the end-effector and (iii) the robot configuration. The proposed approach does not depend on the production domain and could be combined with any algorithm for constructing the initial task sequence.We evaluate the algorithm on a realistic case study and show that it could significantly improve the production time on the test instances from the cutting-deburring domain.