Development of a Human-Robot Interaction System for Industrial Applications

Abstract

The use of robots is increasing day by day. In this study, it was aimed to develop manufacturing-assistant robot software for small production plants involving non-mass production. The main purpose of this study is to eliminate the difficulty of recruiting an expert robot operator thanks to the developed software and to facilitate the use of robots for non-experts. The developed software consists of three parts: the convolutional neural network (CNN), process selection-trajectory generation, and trajectory regulation modules. Before the operations in these modules are executed, operators record the desired process and the trajectory of the process in the video by hand gestures and index finger. Then recorded video is separated into images. The separated images are classified by the CNN module and the positions of landmarks (joint and fingernail of index finger) were calculated by the same module and using the images. Eight different pre-trained CNN structures were tested in the CNN module, and the best result Xception structure (test loss = 0.0051) was used. The desired process was determined and the trajectory of the process was created with the CNN output data. The connection of the generated trajectory with the object was detected by the trajectory regulation module, and unnecessary trajectory parts were cleaned. Regulated trajectory and desired tasks such as welding or sealing were simulated via an industrial robot in a simulation environment. As a result, an industrial robot could be programmed by non-expert operators for companies whose production line is not standard by using the developed software.