Tampere University (TAU) has been working towards making physical tests with the dual armed Yaskawa robot, to work with the wire harness assembly use case belonging to ELVEZ. TAU has been finetuning the physical setup to be more suitable for the robot, as the originally available environment and devices were designed for a human.

TAU has created a technique for generating plans on MoveIt! package, for simultaneous manipulation of both arms in the cartesian coordinate system. With this advancement, we were able to perform an initial phase demonstration of a pick and place operation. The Deformable Linear Object (DLO) which was used as the test workpiece, was a standard VGA cable.

The robot initially picks the cable from a specially designed comb for the ELVEZ use case and places it in a simple guide on the base of a simplified version of the ELVEZ platform. This was successfully demonstrated (check the video attached below) and provided the cornerstone for many new modifications to be implemented for the successful demonstration of the entire assembly process (of the use case).

Additionally, TAU has created the REMODEL Safety Manager (RSM) which is a ROS based node which acts as the interface between the User Interface (UI), System Planner, and the safety controller of the cell. The RSM does not perform any safety actions, the dedicated safety devices and safety controller handle the system safety at the low level. The RSM is used to display the system status to the user and make the safety status accessible to the planner, furthermore, simple resetting and monitoring operations could be performed by a human through the UI. The RSM is built for a generic implementation for all the use cases in REMODEL, as it works on agreed upon protocols and system requirements.

TAU has also been working on a teaching module which employs the use of wearable devices to teach the robot macro-level skills, to correctly perform any abstract task i.e. picking and placing an object, routing a cable, etc. The robot would understand the nature of the operation and gets the target points from a respective file in the CAD platform, and performs the operation based on the requirement. The method has been evaluated so far and the next stage involves testing, collecting demonstrations and documentation.

Written by TAU