Using Assembly Affordances for Flexible Robotic Task Planning

摘要

Enhancing production efficiency, ensuring consistent quality, and significantly reducing manufacturing costs are core benefits of deploying robotic solutions to manufacturing tasks. Leading to automation of assembly tasks being a focus of robotics research since many years, and many solutions have already been successfully deployed into the industry. However, applying those approaches in a human-robot collaboration (HRC) scenario is challenging. Humans introduce an additional uncertainty factor that prohibits pure offline planning and requires plan adaptation during execution. Intelligent planning approaches are therefore needed that consider human intervention from the start and enable further progress toward flexible HRC assembly systems. This paper presents a novel approach to flexible robotic task planning by utilizing assembly affordances, which are perceived opportunities for actions that a component offers in terms of assembly. Our approach integrates affordance-based reasoning within a semantic planning framework to allow online refinement of assembly plans to be used in fully automated scenarios as well as HRC assembly scenarios. The paper presents the developed concept and framework and evaluates it based on the success rate on assemblies of different complexities.