Identifying Feasible Workpiece Placement with Respect to Redundant Manipulator for Complex Manufacturing Tasks

Successfully completing a complex manufacturing task requires finding a feasible placement of the workpiece in the robot workspace. The workpiece placement should be such that the task surfaces on the workpiece are reachable by the robot, the robot can apply the required forces, and the end-effector/tool can move with the desired velocity. This paper formulates the problem of identifying a feasible placement as a non-linear optimization problem over the constraint violation functions. This is a computationally challenging problem. We show that this problem can be solved by successively searching for the solution by incrementally applying different constraints. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using several complex workpieces.