Title: Design of a ROS-based software architecture for robot-agnostic control of pick-and-place tasks
Author of the experiment: Rosanna Coccaro
Description: A ROS-based hardware-agnostic gripper architecture is designed to ease the integration of heterogeneous grippers in modern industrial workcells. Such an architecture includes a general purpose gripper hardware interface which allows for loading different classes of grippers (pneumatic, electric, simulated), and a set of controllers respecting the ROS-control paradigm. The architecture is seamlessly integrated with MoveIt! and exercised on a pick-and-place use case, including a Comau SmartSix robot, equipped with a pneumatic gripper. The video shows the control architecture in action to actuate several heterogeneous grippers by the means of the same controller, as well as the execution of the planning and control pipeline on the pick-and-place task. Trajectories are planned at runtime, with a human in the loop, who oversees the process by validating the planning results before execution.
Title: A ROS architecture for coordinated motion control of cooperating industrial robot manipulators
Author of the experiment: Arianna Zuozo
Description: An end-to-end pipeline is designed to plan and control coordinated motion trajectories. Planning is achieved with a master-slave approach where the master robot task space trajectory is used to generate the slave robot trajectory through a configurable offset function. Trajectories are planned with the aid of MoveIt! for a cooperating system composed by two Comau SmartSix robots and executed both in the simulated and real cooperating workcells. Real robots are controlled by the means of ROS through custom hardware interfaces on top of a real-time Linux-based architecture. Motion coordination is guaranteed through synchronization of their controllers, running ROS across multiple machines in a distributed environment. The robots are engaged in an artwork task, where they cooperatively paint on a canvas.
Title: Haptic control of robotic manipulators for interaction tasks
Author of the experiment: Francesco Avallone
Description: The UR10 robot is teleoperated by the 3D Systems haptic device through a hardware-agnostic ROS-based control architecture. The system features automatic robot engagement, hand tremor cancellation, gravity compensation and realistic rendering of the force feedback. These features together allow for a natural teleoperation experience where the human operator is able to feel the writing forces (normal and friction), while gravity is automatically compensated. In order to increase safety, the robot is controlled via admittance control. The video demonstrates that safe precision interaction tasks are achievable with the designed architecture. The system also automatically logs all the data on both the robot and the haptic device side, thus enabling the construction of a dataset which is representative of the human expertise in performing certain manipulation tasks.
Title: Motion and interaction control in heterogeneous and hyper-flexible robotic workcells
Author of the experiment: Giovanni Longobardi
Description: A ROS-based robot-agnostic software architecture is developed for heterogeneous and hyper-flexible worcells to deploy exactly the same control algorithm on different hardware and simulators. The video shows experiments for motion and interaction control on the Universal Robots' UR10 research robot, the Comau Smart-Six industrial robot and their digital twins. Trajectories are executed while interaction with the surrounding environment is handled through the acquisition of forces by means of different types of force/torque sensors mounted at the robot flange. The aim is to demonstrate that widely used algorithms for robot control can be made independent of the hardware architecture, with no need to recompile the code for each single robot, simplifying robot programming, increasing flexibility and reducing maintenance costs, without sacrificing performances.