Manual guidance of non-collaborative robotic arms

• Autor(a) principal: Fraga, Marcelo Ferreira Gonçalves
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/34063

The concept of Human-Robot interaction has been in development over these last few years and recent studies in the robotics industry are showing the potential of collaboration between humans and robots. The idea of programming an industrial robot to execute a repetitive or heavy duty task is undergoing a considerable transformation and the evolution is noticeable in the various industrial sectors. Previously, the dangerous nature of classical robots working at full speed, moved the community away from creating collaborative solutions. In the present day, the classical industrial manipulators are being outmatched by the more recent collaborative robots, built to increase productivity and enable a collaborative environment with human operators. These manipulators have the ability to be hand driven by regular users, simplifying this task for those who operate or configure them. While the typical behavior of a manipulator is to ignore any external collisions, in compliance modes, the robot reacts to external forces and moves in the direction that it's being pushed. This is a natural way of moving the robot and allows its users to create trajectories and plan tasks that would otherwise need to be done using programming knowledge. The classical industrial manipulators, however, don't inherently have this capability. A large portion of industries that currently have manipulator based solutions, rely on older industrial manipulator models to perform their tasks. Reprogramming these models using arduous and unnatural programming tasks decreases overall productivity. Given that the replacement of the industrial manipulators with collaborative robots involves excessive costs, sometimes unbearable by the companies, the main objective of this dissertation arises: The creation of a generic solution of compliance that can be deployed in any manipulator independently of their type, brand or model. A research study regarding the manipulator dynamics and kinematics was developed and an approach based on the rigid-body dynamics equation was created. A simulated environment was built to validate all research and test the solutions before being deployed in a real robotic arm. All developed algorithms were then tested in a real manipulator, the Universal Robots UR10e, in order to prove the solution's effectiveness. To corroborate the implemented methods, we performed several experiences to compare our solution to the more sophisticated impedance control approaches seen in collaborative robots. We were successful in introducing compliance in manipulators lacking this feature by attaching the compliance solutions to their external interface.