Teaching Assembly by Demonstration using Advanced Human Robot Interaction and a Knowledge Integration Framework

Conventional industrial robots are heavily dependent on hard automation that requires pre-specified fixtures and time-consuming (re) programming performed by experienced operators. In this work, teaching by human-only demonstration is used for reducing required time and expertise to setup a robotized assembly station. This is achieved by the proposed framework enhancing the robotic system with advanced perception and cognitive abilities, accessed through a user-friendly Human Robot Interaction interface. The approach is evaluated on a small parts' assembly use case deployed onto a collaborative industrial robot testbed. Experiments indicate that the proposed approach allows inexperienced users to efficiently teach robots new assembly tasks. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.