A Dual-arm Collaborative Robot System for the Smart Factories of the Future

In the era of Industry 4.0, collaborative robots have been one of the main pillars enabling flexible automation. This paper investigates the benefits of integrating a dual-arm collaborative robot system in a smart factory and an Industry 4.0 context with particular focus on solving complex industrial disassembly tasks. The increased human-like capabilities of the system stemming from two arms, dual tooling and advanced vision bring enhanced dexterity allowing for simultaneous control and synchronous movement of both robot arms and product components. The presented work addresses the design considerations and overall hardware and software architecture of Little Helper 7, a collaborative robot system which consists of commercial off-the-shelf components, and ROS as a middleware for data communication, motion planning, 3D vision, and control. Preliminary experiments performed with Little Helper 7, demonstrate promising system capabilities such as path planning for both arms for synchronous movement while avoiding collision and accurate estimation of the location of objects in the workspace.