Technical Paper presented Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing Conference

The research teams at project partners National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and PROFACTOR from Austria have presented a joint technical paper related to their work in the SOPRANO project titled "Dynamic Adaptability in Human-Robot Collaboration for Industrial Assembly: A Behaviour Tree Based Task Execution" at the 33rd International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing (FAIM), held in Taichung, Taiwan on 23-26 June.

Abstract:

This work deals with the intricacies of human-robot collaboration (HRC) within industrial settings, with a focus on achieving seamless interaction through a skill-based robot task execution engine. The proposed framework intricately orchestrates the dynamic interplay between the perception and acting/reacting layers in the context of human-robot collaboration, with a specific emphasis on the role of Behavior Trees (BTs) in both task execution and deviation handling. The Behavior Tree-based Task Execution (BTE) is seamlessly integrated into the acting/reacting layer, collaborating synergistically with the perception layer, which includes robot proprioception and object localization modules. This integration facilitates the efficient detection and handling of deviations, particularly those arising from failures during robotic manipulation (grasping), ensuring real-time responsiveness to environmental changes in collaborative assembly tasks. Real-world experiments conducted on a car door assembly line serve as practical demonstrations of the proposed framework’s adaptability to address deviations in dynamic environments.

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