Robotic low stress assembly of large, compliant components

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Markus Böl; Professor Dr.-Ing. Michael Sinapius; Professor Dr. Jochen Steil
• Subject Area: Automation, Mechatronics, Control Systems, Intelligent Technical Systems, Robotics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524289249

The assembly of large, compliant components consists of four main steps: First, the components must be picked up, then brought to the place of assembly, placed there in the optimal position, and finally joined at the assembly points. Automated assembly of large, compliant components is by no means state of the art today as there are numerous unsolved challenges in doing so. These include the large scale of the components, the crucial role of their deformations and the high variety of applications that require very flexible planning and execution. On the other hand, robot technology is increasingly finding its way into industrial manufacturing and production. The Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulator (AIMM), a fusion of a mobile platform and a robotic arm, plays a particular role here. However, so far mobile robots have not been widely adopted in industrial production, especially not in large-scale assembly processes. In a respective production environment such as the aerospace industry, the use of mobile platforms is desirable. This project targets the use of AIMMs for the low-stress assembly of large flexible components. The necessary research within AIMM mainly covers three major areas. First, there are topics that deal with 6D position estimation of a particular component. This area is heavily dependent on the development of artificial neural networks and the ability to train them automatically. Second, there is a need for research on sophisticated robot control dealing with offline optimal path planning, execution time, path length and energy optimization, environment modeling, multisensor fusion, and online planning approaches under the significant constraints that the workpiece and the scenario impose. Finally, interaction with large components presents a disproportionately more complex challenge in assembly planning and execution that is still uncharted scientific terrain. Specific challenges that are not present in mobile handling of small objects arise from the scale of maneuvering and mounting large components, the influence of the earth's gravity field as it affects the internal stresses and states for both the manipulated component and the robotic platform itself with increasing size, respectively. These require modeling of the component’s physical properties and deformations and insertion of that models in the movement and assembly planning to maintain low stress during the entire transport and assembly process. The assembly of large components in the Earth's gravity field using AIMMs is therefore largely unaddressed in the literature. Therefore, the aim of this project is to research and develop appropriate methods that advance and combine expertise from adaptronics (Sinapius), mechanics (Böl), and robotics (Steil) to this aim.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants