Automated assembly skill acquisition and implementation through human demonstration

Acquiring robot assembly skills through human demonstration is an important research problem and can be used to quickly program robots in future manufacturing industries. To teach robots complex assembly skills, the robots should be able to recognize the objects (parts and tools) involved, the actions applied, and the effect of the actions on the parts. It is non-trivial to recognize the subtle assembly actions. To estimate the effect of the actions on the assembly part is also challenging due to the small part sizes. In this paper, using a RGB-D camera, we build a Portable Assembly Demonstration (PAD) system which can automatically recognize the objects (parts/tools) involved, the actions conducted and the assembly states characterizing the spatial relationship among the parts. The experiment results proved that this PAD system can generate a high level assembly script with decent accuracy in object and action recognition as well as assembly state estimation. The assembly script is successfully implemented on a Baxter robot. (c) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.