MACHINE LEARNING-BASED ROBOTIC OBJECT DETECTION AND GRASPING FOR COLLABORATIVE ASSEMBLY

Abstract

An integral part of information-centric smart manufacturing is the adaptation of industrial robots to complement human workers in a collaborative manner. While advancement in sensing has enabled real-time monitoring of workspace, understanding the semantic information in the workspace, such as parts and tools, remains a challenge for seamless robot integration. The resulting lack of adaptivity to perform in a dynamic workspace have limited robots to tasks with pre-defined actions. In this paper, a machine learning-based robotic object detection and grasping method is developed to improve the adaptivity of robots. Specifically, object detection based on the concept of single-shot detection (SSD) and convolutional neural network (CNN) is investigated to recognize and localize objects in the workspace. Subsequently, the extracted information from object detection, such as the type, position, and orientation of the object, is fed into a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to generate the desired joint angles of robotic arm for proper object grasping and handover to the human worker. Network training is guided by forward kinematics of the robotic arm in a self-supervised manner to mitigate issues such as singularity in computation. The effectiveness of the developed method is validated on an eDo robotic arm in a human-robot collaborative assembly case study.