Towards Flexible Manufacturing: Motion Generation Concept for Coupled Multi-Robot Systems

摘要

This paper presents a motion generation concept with stiffness and path constraints for multi-robot systems in a flexible manufacturing context. An optimization approach using closed-form inverse kinematics solutions is proposed to maximize the Cartesian stiffness, simultaneously preserving the continuity of the joints' movement. We also present an efficient trajectory generation approach combining Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Online Trajectory Generation (OTG) methods. For the sake of synchronization, we assume a 14 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) closed-chain kinematics for the trajectory generation of the dual-robot system. We evaluate the proposed approach on a mock-up of the sheet metal bending task using two coupled Franka Emika robots. The results show that the proposed method increases the stiffness of the robot, as it can apply three times the force compared to benchmark methods before reaching the joint torque limit in the single robot experiments. Furthermore, two physically coupled Panda robots can generate a force of up to 732 N with joint torque limits set to 10%.