Within the project SMARTHANDLE KUKA is working on enhancement of the productivity, flexibility, and sustainability of the handling operations together with research and industrial institutions from Greece, Spain, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Belgium.
In SMARTHANDLE, KUKA will tackle different challenges, e.g., how to control a multi-arm robotics system considering geometrical constraints or how to plan a motion without losing a grasped object. Therefore, KUKA is working on the development of novel motion algorithms to plan and execute industrial tasks on single- and multi-arm robot systems. Based on task descriptions, which combine CAD data and geometric constraints, algorithms can calculate feasible motions through exploiting robot and process redundancies.
Since geometric constraints are imposed in closed loops on different systems, classical position control strategies may fail to deliver feasible solutions, that satisfy the prerequisites of the systems, and subsequently fail to meet the safety requirements. Hence new methods based on the combination of position, force, and impedance control for multi-arm system will be developed by KUKA. These control systems should receive not only stand-alone inputs from the process planner, but also feedback from their robotic counterparts. The development and the global implementation of this control architecture will be the focus of the multi-arm robot planning.
Another research topic in SMARTHANDLE is AI based grasping of known and unknown workpieces. For this KUKA will adapt and extend existing learning-based grasping techniques, especially by advancing them from single-arm grasping to dual-arm grasping. With these techniques feasible grasps are determined by scoring them according to their grasp success probability.
All previously mentioned technologies will be evaluated and validated in two industrial real-life scenarios. The first scenario, proposed by Greek aluminum products manufacturer ALUMIL, refers to the handling and transportation of bulky workpieces such as aluminum profiles. The second scenario, proposed by Belgian automotive tier-one supplier ABEE, concerns the disassembly of car batteries packs.