Towards control and sensing for an autonomous mobile robotic assistant navigating assembly lines
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Shah_Towards control.pdf
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3.88 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Boerkoel, James C.
Bix, Johannes
Bartscher, Stefan
Unhelkar, Vaibhav Vasant
Perez, Jorge I.
Shah, Julie A
Date Issued
October 2014
Journal
Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Unhelkar, Vaibhav V. et al. “Towards Control and Sensing for an Autonomous Mobile Robotic Assistant Navigating Assembly Lines.” 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 31 May-7 Junes, 2014, Hong Kong, China.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
There exists an increasing demand to incorporate mobile interactive robots to assist humans in repetitive, non-value added tasks in the manufacturing domain. Our aim is to develop a mobile robotic assistant for fetch-and-deliver tasks in human-oriented assembly line environments. Assembly lines present a niche yet novel challenge for mobile robots; the robot must precisely control its position on a surface which may be either stationary, moving, or split (e.g. in the case that the robot straddles the moving assembly line and remains partially on the stationary surface). In this paper we present a control and sensing solution for a mobile robotic assistant as it traverses a moving-floor assembly line. Solutions readily exist for control of wheeled mobile robots on static surfaces; we build on the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) software architecture and generalize the algorithms for the moving line environment. Off-the-shelf sensors and localization algorithms are explored to sense the moving surface, and a customized solution is presented using PX4Flow optic flow sensors and a laser scanner-based localization algorithm. Validation of the control and sensing system is carried out both in simulation and in hardware experiments on a customized treadmill. Initial demonstrations of the hardware system yield promising results; the robot successfully maintains its position while on, and while straddling, the moving line.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2014.6907464
