Easy Reconfiguration of Modular Industrial Collaborative Robots

Collaborative robots have gained a high interest in both research and industry over the past decade as a response to the need for more flexible and agile manufacturing equipment. In contrast to traditional industrial robots, collaborative robots are not isolated by fences, but work alongside the production staff collaborating to perform common tasks. This change of environment imposes a much more dynamic lifecycle for the robot which consequently requires new ways of interacting.

This thesis investigates how the changeover to a new task on a collaborative robot can be performed by the shop floor operators already working alongside the robot. To effectively perform this changeover, the operator must both reconfigure the hardware of the robot and reprogram the robot to match the new task.
To enable shop floor operators to quickly and intuitively program the robot, this thesis proposes the use of parametric, task-related robot skills with a manual parameterization method.
Reconfiguring the hardware entails adding, removing, or modifying some of the robot’s components. This thesis investigate how software configurator tools can aid the operator in selecting appropriate hardware modules, and how agent-based control structures can be used to make module exchange efficient and effortless for the operator while maintaining a high utilization of module functionality.