Cooperative Robotic Manipulation for the Smart Factory

To tackle the upcoming needs of the new Industry 4.0 paradigm, where cyberphysical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and humans in real time, the control of a robot must be able to guarantee a high level of flexibility, in order to accomplish a variety of tasks that go beyond the usual, standardized, robotic cell ones taking place within a very structured environment. Stemming from the wellestablished line of research on control of high degrees of freedom marine systems investigated in the GRAAL Lab where I carried out my PhD, the focus of this work has been to develop a general robot control framework to transfer the know-how acquired in years of marine research to industrial scenarios. In the perspective of building a solution that fits them all, removing the need to create specific solutions for every single problem, the main idea has been to develop a framework that provides a set of basic control capabilities, as building blocks for the robots to perform complex actions. In this context the PhD work focused on the development of a real time control framework and adaptation of the involved structures, to develop an experimentally working set up that is capable of: handling different robotic structures (fixed base arms, single and dual arm mobile manipulators either working on ground or underwater) in a uniform way; handling cooperation between different agents; being able to perform interaction tasks with the environment and human beings; exposing interfaces to guarantee a good integration with the higher levels of planning, decision and command, with the goal of releasing them from dealing with lower level control problems. From the technological point of view, a key objective has been to develop the software architecture, implementing the control framework, in order to achieve the highest possible re-usability and flexibility. This allowed an easy application of the control framework to different robotic setups, minimizing the development effort to adapt not only the control laws, but also all the collateral supporting software needed to interact with the specific robot-software environment. To the above aims I exploited different hardware resources such as two YouBots platforms and a Baxter bi-manual robotic system, collecting experimental results which validate the proposed approach.