Motivation

As part of the ForNextCobot project, it will be explored how people approach tasks that require physical interaction in order to transfer such patterns of behavior to a new generation of collaborative robots which are evolving to be as efficient as their predecessors, as well as safe to work with, in the direct interaction with humans on an assembly line, in hospital, or home environment.

According to the Executive Summary on industrial robotics from the International Federation of Robotics, robotic technology dominates in factories with 400.000 installed industrial robots and an approximate annual increase of 30%. Although contemporary robots offer high performances, payload capacity, repeatability, and velocity, they occupy a lot of working space and cause safety concerns. Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly apparent that factories of the future will be founded on effective collaboration between robots and humans.

Accordingly, the latest robot generation, collaborative robots have been developed to function in a way that meets safety requirements in contact with humans and can be fully integrated into the workspace. However, contemporary collaborative robots still have rigid connections between their actuators and joints/links while safety is increased thanks to sensors – collisions can be promptly and accurately identified, and a shutdown can prevent robots from creating damage. Although collaborative robots of this kind have already entered a commercial market, the next generation of collaborative robots is being intensively planned and designed. This new robot generation will exploit the performances of current stiff robots and bring new safety levels by introducing compliance in the actuators!

In order to coordinate and, at the same time, count in all the aspects: performances, safety, and energy efficiency, a new generation of robots will be built around new actuation technology – variable impedance/stiffness actuators

Although the VIA design and control have been extensively presented in the research community, widely accepted guidelines about robot impedance/stiffness planning are still missing. Furthermore, considering that impedance/stiffness is not a measurable parameter, its estimation still remains an open scientific question that is supposed to enable new closed-loop control approaches of VIA and Cartesian robot impedance.

This project targets the above-mentioned research challenges through the three main tasks:

Challenge 1
Challenge 2
Challenge 3

Understanding impedance planning of humans as a reference point for impedance planning of robots and a tool for collaborative human-robot tasks,

Development of robot impedance estimators which will advance methods for impedance robot control, and finally

Development of impedance robot planning for a new generation of collaborative robots which will be actuated by VIA and combined with kinematic redundancy for effective Cartesian robot control.