Coordination and path planning of a heterogeneous multi-robot system for sheet metal drilling

摘要

This paper presents the details of a sub-system developed to address coordination between a serial manipulator robot (machining) and SwarmItFIX robot (fixturing) for a sheet metal drilling process. A heterogeneous multi-robot coordination methodology that has already been demonstrated to be successful in a milling process has been further enhanced here to make it suitable for a drilling process. For the convergence of joint angles in the trajectory planning of the serial manipulator robot, an optimisation-based approach is proposed. The velocity of the tool center point (TCP) is considered to be constant throughout, as it improves the quality of the machining. The SwarmItFIX robot abides by a revised five-step locomotion strategy to traverse between any two support locations. A new time plan that ensures multi-robot coordination has also been proposed in this work. The proposed method has been tested with three different drilling patterns, and the results show that the proposed method computes the trajectory of the serial manipulator, support locations of the SwarmItFIX and locomotion sequence of the base agent accurately.