Robot Assembly Skills Based on Compliant Motion

Abstract:
Up to now, industrial robots are mostly programmed with procedural programming languages that support the specification of robot motion sequences. Still, creating a robot application requires relatively deep robot programming knowledge, and is time consuming. For decades, the robotics community has been working on approaches for supporting robot programming on a task-oriented level i.e. defining the robot tasks rather than motion. One of them is introducing robot skills, which are robot functions representing robot capabilities to perform certain tasks. However, existing robot skill models involve knowledge and control policies that are usually complex and difficult to implement, as well as not easy to use by application engineers. To achieve practically usable results, we focus on assembly applications and introduce a relatively simple control policy for robotic skills utilizing compliant motion control. Furthermore, we propose a software concept for application programming based on such robot skills and demonstrate its feasibility with test implementations.