Motion planning with worker's trajectory prediction for assembly task partner robot

Abstract

We have developed a novel assembly task partner robot to support workers in their task. This system, PaDY (in-time Parts/tools Delivery to You robot), delivers parts and tools to a worker by recognizing the worker's behavior in the car production line; thus, improving the efficiency of the work by reducing the worker's physical workload for picking parts and tools. For this purpose, it is necessary to plan the trajectory of the robot before the worker moves to the next location for another assembling task. First a prediction method for the worker's trajectory using a Markov model for a discretized work space into cells is proposed, then motion planning method is proposed using the predicted worker's trajectory and a mixture Gaussian distribution for each area corresponding to each procedure of the work process in the automobile coordinate system. Experimental results illustrate the validity of the proposed motion planning method. © 2012 IEEE.