Collaborative robotic finishing platform for metal part processing towards industry 5.0

Manual finishing operations in aerospace and ground transportation industries are often associated with health-and-safety-related issues such as musculoskeletal disorders, productivity loss, and challenges in workforce renewal. This work presents an innovative automated solution to address these challenges, prioritizing the ease of implementation and affordability for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs). Our proposed solution is a collaborative robotic (cobotic) finishing platform designed to eliminate labor-intensive work while keeping human operators in the loop to manage unforeseen situations. This platform aims to eliminate health risks, enhance repeatability, improve product quality, and increase productivity. This paper describes the mechanical design of the platform, its embedded cyber-physical system (CPS), interactivity features, as well as its risk assessment and risk mitigation. The platform integrates a UR10 cobot mounted upside down on a gantry structure to expand workspace, along with 3D sensors, scene cameras, compliance end-effectors, a dust collection system, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and augmented reality projectors to assist the operator for easy execution of finishing tasks. The CPS comprises interconnected physical twins, their models, and relevant packages for the control of the whole finishing process from PLC to autonomous robot programming. Safety measures, including safety-rated devices, attenuation measures, and personal protective equipment, are integrated to ensure operator’s safety. While many research streams are fully integrated into the platform and CPS, some are still in the process of integration. Despite this, various finishing tasks have been successfully executed using the platform, demonstrating its potential to transform metal part finishing processes in industry.

Uncontrolled Keywords

• Cobot
• Finishing operations
• Compliance
• Cyber-Physical System
• ROS
• Toolpath generation
• Autonomous path planning
• Parallel robot
• Risk assessment
• Implicit surface representation
• Meshing
• Point cloud alignment
• Pose refinement
• Volumetric grid
• Human-machine interaction
• Gesture recognition