In this paper we present the findings of a usability study for a monitoring robotic unit tele-operated via a virtual fixtures (VF) based control framework. The study aims at investigating the impact of VF on the robot navigation as well as the impact of multimodal feedback on the user performance in a static inspection task. The findings will help in the design of the monitoring control framework to inspect a robotised welding process, as it has been researched in previous work. The study has been conducted with untrained participants, involved in four different test scenarios. The experiments treated a static case in which users were asked to navigate the monitoring robot in the workspace to find a lit LED of a test-piece. The statistical analysis of the experiment metrics showed a positive impact of the VF control on the navigation of the monitoring robot even for users with no previous experience. Moreover, from the analysis of the task load index forms (TLX) it emerged that the combination of VF control and additional multimodal feedback improved the user performance without negatively impacting the effort required to accomplish the task.

Robotics Innovation Facilities (RIFs) are open to the public labs which provide state-of-the-art robotic hardware and software, as well as scientific and technical support. Anticipating market trends, the RIFs instrument cover a wide range of application areas. Users can come from all areas, regardless of if they already have robotics experience or not. This article details the procedure developed at the three ECHORD++ RIFs—Bristol, UK, Paris-Saclay, France and Peccioli, Italy- and some results and contributions in robotic technoloy.

Future robotic assembly systems will allow product designers to upload their assembled product models remotely such that they can be assembled autonomously. In this work we present the architecture for a Click and Assemble Robotic Assembly (CARA) system. This architecture takes an assembly file uploaded by the user through a web interface as the only input. It then performs all the necessary planning before executing the assembly. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that all of the required components from previous advances in robotic assembly have been brought together, with all interconnecting challenges solved, into a complete working system for physical, real world assembly tasks. To demonstrate the implemented architecture capabilities, a real industrial product with tight tolerances was assembled from its CAD file only, illustrating the end to end robotic assembly premise in a real world setting.

In this paper, the use of a monitoring companion is proposed to more efficiently collect the process information during the tuning of industrial systems, and therefore to assist the system integrator in the optimization process for complex robotic installations. The monitoring companion consists of an industrial manipulator (monitoring robot) and a Unity-ROS framework for controlling it. We discuss in this paper the features that allow the solution to be re-used in different industrial application thanks to its compatibility with ROS. In particular, we present the approach based on admittance virtual fixtures and how we use such abstraction to track a moving target (it could be the end-effector of another robot for example). Moreover, the concept of varying compliance is introduced as a way to influence the motion of the monitoring robot on the virtual fixtures in the presence of obstacles. The experiments have been conducted in simulation as well as on real hardware to test the accuracy of the system at respecting the virtual fixtures with both a static and a moving monitoring target, although in the current implementation the varying compliance was not included in the experiments.

The recent progress made in the field of Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality (AR/MR) has opened new possibilities and approaches to research areas that can benefit from 3D visualization of digital content in the real world. In fact, human-robot interaction design and the design of user interfaces have very much to gain from MR technologies. Nonetheless, designing the user-robot interaction and processing multimodal feedbacks are very challenging tasks. In this paper we focus in particular on interactions in mixed reality.

The recent progress made in the field of Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality (AR/MR) has opened new possibilities and approaches to research areas that can benefit from 3D visualization of digital content in the real world. In fact, human-robot interaction design and the design of user interfaces have very much to gain from MR technologies. Nonetheless, designing the user-robot interaction and processing multimodal feedbacks are very challenging tasks. In this paper we focus in particular on interactions in mixed reality. The main contribution of this paper is the implementation of a control system for an industrial manipulator through the user's interactions with MR content displayed with the Microsoft HoloLens. The system is based on the communication between Unity3D (used to design the user experience) and ROS, therefore extendible to any ROS-compatible robotic hardware.

A human robot cooperation (HRC) planner for joint assembly tasks is presented. By combining first order logic (FoL) planning and object oriented programming, plans embedded in objects (PeO) can be produced. This concept shifts the focus of planning from actions to objects, thus defining them in terms of objects and combinations of their actions. The produced plans are represented using tree structures, which capture the task execution status in terms of completeness, agents’ roles and actions’ order. The planner and its application program interface (API) were written and developed using SWI-Prolog. This API allowed the planner to take various inputs to create different plans, and simultaneously to get a variety of useful outputs. The planner was tested in a collaborative pipe assembly task as a part of a bigger architecture implemented on the Baxter robot. It was able to generate the plan and achieve successful execution. This proof-of-concept planner shows great potential; allowing for a novel description in the HRC domain and execution of human-robot interaction tasks with industrial production in mind. However, first results are presented here; more work is required to take the work to higher technology readiness levels.

The continuous need for agility coupled with increasing labour costs and improvements in reliability and capability of automation has meant a renewed interest in the application of robots to many manufacturing activities. Research at the University of the West of England, Bristol has focused on the design of an integrated, modular system for the assembly of large products. The work under the ALASCA project has resulted in a number of technologies that will significantly affect assembly automation. The paper discusses the latest results from this work and presents the experimental conclusions thus far.