Reducing Set-Up Times by Designing Grippers in Simulation
In the last 5 years, a method for learning fingers for industrial grippers has been developed in a co-operation between SDU-Robotics and Bialystok Technical University. By this method, cumbersome work on gripper generation, which is a severe obstacle for the fast set-up of robot solutions, could be transferred to simulation. This very fruitful co-operation has led to multiple conference papers (Wolniakowski et al. 2014, 2015, 2016).
In this work an objective function for gripper evaluation is derived and then optimized by means of numerical optimization methods. The approach has been evaluated on a variety of real world applications (Wolniakowski et al. 2016) and is currently applied in the FoF Project ReconCell (2015-2018) to a number of industrial use-cases. The figure below shows an industrial gripper with fingers learned by the new approach that have been applied in the recently ended EU project ACAT. Adam Wolniakowski, who has been supervised by Prof. N. Krüger from SDU-Robotics and Prof. Zdzisław Gosiewski from Białystok Technical University will have his PhD defense on 10th of November 2016.
References
A. Wolniakowski, A. Kramberger, A. Gams, D. Chrysostomou, F. Hagelskjær, T. N. Thulesen, L. Kiforenko, A. G. Buch, L. Bodenhagen, H. G. Petersen, O. Madsen, A. Ude and N. Krüger. Optimizing Grippers for Compensating Pose Uncertainties by Dynamic Simulation. IEEE International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots 2016.
A. Wolniakowski, J. A. Jørgensen, K. Miatliuk, H. G. Petersen, and N. Krüger. Task and context sensitive optimization of gripper design using dynamic grasp simulation. Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Methods and Models in Automation and Robotics (MMAR), IEEE, 2015.
A. Wolniakowski, K. Miatliuk, N. Krüger and J.A. Jørgensen. Automatic evaluation of task-focused parallel jaw gripper design. Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots. Brugali, D., Broenink, JF, Kroeger,T. and MacDonald, BA (red.). Springer, p. 450-461 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Nr. 8810), 2014. o SDU Robotics implements technology on a highly flexible assembly robot at Danfoss