Applied Industrial Robotics

摘要

Applied Industrial Robotics(AIR)refers to the application technologies developed on the basis of existing industrial robots. The major research and development objective of AIR is to enable the existing industrial robots with enhanced sensing and adaptability, user-friendly human-machine interface, shortened preparation and deployment time, improved positioning accuracy, and expanded applications. However, AIR has not been received sufficient attention in robotics community, which results in a big technology gap between robot manufacturing and industrial applications. Such a situation not only affects the adoption and application of industrial robots, but also limits the growth of the industrial robot manufacturing industry. Based on the technical problems encountered in utilization of industrial robots for manufacturing automation, this paper introduced the major research and development works as well as future directions pertaining to AIR, such as intuitive teaching and rapid programming(ease of use), kinematic calibration and error compensation(improvement of accuracy), and hybrid force-motion control(expansion of application)technologies. The existing teaching and offline programming methods of industrial robots have the limitations of neither efficient nor accurate, which make the industrial robots difficult to use. As such, three major intuitive teaching and rapid programming approaches have been investigated, i.e., lead through teaching, teaching and programming based on multi-sensor fusion, and programming by demonstration. Current research efforts are focused on intuitive programming with an augmented environment through the fusion of the workpiece CAD model and the sensor information. It is well known that the industrial robots have high repeatability but low absolute accuracy, which makes the off-line programming method inaccurate. A variety of robot calibration and error compensation techniques have been studied, such as the error model based offline calibration, tool-based in-situ calibration, and sensor guided on-line error compensation.