Multi-Robot Coordinated Motion

Demanding industrial applications from cold spraying to additive manufacturing are increasingly deploying multiple robots in a coordinated fashion. For cold spray coating, leading industry deployment involves a dual-robot system, where one robot holds the part and the second robot holds the spray gun to impinge metal powders onto the part. For wire-arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), the welding robot, the positioner, and the metrology inspection robots all need to be coordinated to ensure high-quality end products. This talk will discuss issues and the latest advances that arise in such coordinated operation of multiple industrial robots, including: 

• Overall control architecture integrating sensors and robots from different vendors.
• Kinematics calibration of multiple robots.
• Redundancy resolution.
• Tracking accuracy through motion adaptation and learning

Use case results for cold spraying and WAAM using ABB, FANUC, and Motoman robots will be presented.

John Wen, Professor and Head, Electrical, Computer, & Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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