Development

Development Interests

FASN’s development interests are two-fold: 1) to provide immediate value to industry and 2) to provide students with automation experience. Projects relate to, developing hardware, integrating hardware, and programming hardware to perform challenging manipulation tasks. Each project scope ranges from single component design/integration to full assembly cell design/integration/programming.

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Development Topics

  • Industrial automation
  • Contact interaction demonstration
  • Variable stiffness actuator design
  • Custom robot design

Projects

High Speed Robot Playing Bananagrams

Student Project: Nico Yah

This demonstration uses a 4 degree of freedom manipulator (Epson T6) to play Bananagrams in which scattered letter tiles are arranged in a grid of connected words. The tasks of tile location and character recognition are performed by the Epson Vision Guidance System. The task of solving the Bananagrams problem is executed by a Python script on a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi (server) sends the grid placement positions of each tile to the robot (client). This is a playful example of AI being used in a robotic manipulation task involving problem-solving. This industrial robot (Epson T6) arranges the tiles about 5 times faster than the collaborative robot (Universal Robotics UR5).

Robot Playing Bananagrams

Student Project: Tony Carrasco, Jonathan Schimmels

This demonstration uses a 6 degree of freedom manipulator (Universal Robotics UR5) to play Bananagrams in which scattered letter tiles are arranged in a grid of connected words. The complex tasks of optical character recognition and solving the Bananagrams problem are executed in C++ functions on a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi (server) sends the target pick/place poses to the robot (client). This is a playful example of AI being used in a robotic manipulation task involving problem-solving.

Flashlight Assembly and Engraving

Senior Design Team: James McKenna, Phil Parisi, Rachel Witt, Jacob Fuchs, and Jordan Obert

This demonstration uses a 7 degree of freedom manipulator (Rethink Robot's Sawyer) to assemble a flashlight and insert it into a laser engraver. The manipulator, engraver, additional pneumatic gripper, and a light detector are integrated with a Python script on a PC. The Python script prompts the user to type a string of characters to be engraved and runs the demonstration. At the end of the demonstration, the end-effector releases the flashlight after a light torque it applied. The series elastic actuators in the robot joints provide the compliance needed to reliably screw the cap onto the flashlight and to open the engraver's door.

Turning a Crank

Andrew Bernhard

This demonstration shows a manipulator turning a crank handle to lift a weight. The robot quickly and reliably completes the task even though the end-effector is rigidly attached to the handle (free rotation about the handle axis) and there is intentional misalignment (the robot's commanded circular trajectory is not located at the actual crank center). The robot uses variable stiffness actuators (VSAs) to provide higher stiffness in the direction of crank handle motion and lower stiffness in the normal direction. The strategically controlled elastic behavior of the end-effector manages the contact forces while performing the work of lifting the weight. The control structure is open-loop, feed-forward, position control for 6 motors. Each joint has a motor to control the gross position and a motor to control the joint stiffness.