[HN Gopher] State of Industrial Robotics: Emerging Tech, Challen...
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State of Industrial Robotics: Emerging Tech, Challenges, Key
Research Directions [pdf]
Author : contingencies
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-01-06 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (workofthefuture.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (workofthefuture.mit.edu)
| Animats wrote:
| Strange. That reads like a pitch for Rethink Robotics, a MIT
| spinoff, from 10 years ago. They were going to make robots that
| could work alongside humans and do so cheaply. "Baxter" was their
| first product. It was a flop. The robot was not precise enough
| for assembly, using it to move things from one place to another
| wasn't cost effective, and the "learning" wasn't that helpful.
|
| This paper should have examined that critically and discussed
| what has to be fixed for the next try at this.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Reading this as a controls engineer who frequently deals with
| industrial robotics, it looks like there are three main points
| being made:
|
| 1. Industry 4.0/Cyber-physical systems: Basically, the process of
| getting a database server to speak Ethercat/Profinet/EthernetIP
| and upload tag values from all the PLCs in the plant. Then you
| run some statistics and flag trends or anomalies and have a
| process engineer squint at the most promising graphs. This is a
| lot easier to do than of keeping track of cycle time, average
| sensor values, faults etc. on a whiteboard or clipboard (and
| don't expect vendors of traditional HMIs to make this easy to do
| on individual screens...HMIs are one of the most regressive parts
| of the industry). It's not as complicated as the
| C-level/government sales pitch makes it sound, but not a bad
| idea.
|
| 2. Safety around collaborative robots is hard. You want the robot
| to be able to accelerate heavy objects fast, but also to not hurt
| the squishy human in the same volume. Part of this can be fixed
| by improved electronics that can detect ever-smaller torque
| anomalies so that your 1kg payload robot detects a force more
| like a 2kg payload and comes to a halt after gently shoving the
| operator. But there's a fundamental limit where no matter the
| sensor resolution or how fast you can stop, contact between your
| 100kg, 2000mm/s cast steel robot arm and somebody's skull is
| going to hurt the human.
|
| 3. Anyone familiar with natural-language programming, voice
| interfaces, or domain-specific languages will probably see the
| hazard they run into with the second point:
|
| > _Improved programming and communication interfaces can enable
| humans with little programming experience to control robots to
| perform a variety of tasks,while communication interfaces enable
| robots to communicate with other hardware and software._
|
| Yes, robotics manufacturers are improving their software - your
| teach pendant is probably a color touchscreen now, instead of a
| 480x320 monochrome display with a few softkeys. But solving hard
| problems is always hard, and it's probably always going to take a
| programmer (whether that's part of their job title or not) who
| understands the solution to the problem to express that in a
| precise way so the software can understand it. Otherwise you've
| just made a more complicated system that usually solves the
| problem, and dropping back to a level that actually fully
| expresses the decision tree leaves you with more complicated
| interfaces. There's certainly a lot of room to make the interface
| easier to use, but it's always going to take some programming.
| Doubly so if you're trying to integrate vision or additional
| analog axes. Stick with digital sensors, open/close grippers, and
| highly tolerant processes if you want it to be easy enough for an
| operator to pick up a pendant and do useful work.
|
| My company, unlike some of our competitors, typically does not
| lock our customers out of their teach pendants to keep their
| warranty intact. It does sometimes mean that I need to come back
| and touch up a point where the operator saw that the robot
| sometimes failed to make the target and had their technician move
| it a little too far, so now the parts at the other side of the
| tolerance range don't fit anymore, but typically both sides are
| acting in good faith and we work through that.
|
| I think it's going to take some third-party robot software like
| RoboDK to make this more intuitive. Right now,
| Yaskawa/Fanuc/Kuka/ABB/Epson/Denso etc. are burdened with:
|
| A) Customer bases who are productive with their legacy teach
| pendants and Pascal-like programming languages, and have a
| significant familiarity with their 2000-page manuals.
|
| B) Robot operating systems that work. It's hard to justify
| starting fresh, so you have to leave the quirks and complexities
| of old systems.
|
| C) Simulator/IDE software departments that are their own
| cost/profit center in the automation company. Sure, the company
| manufactures hardware, but mostly you have to program it with the
| pendant (which might itself be a line item), the offline IDE is
| an optional line item that costs several thousand dollars. The
| offline simulator is extra, vision programming is extra, CAM
| toolpath generation is extra, each new network interface is
| extra...
|
| Because of these factors, existing players will have a hard time
| making things intuitive.
|
| Side note: Figure 2, the 2-position dial table with the light
| curtains, is a frequently-seen design but IMO a dangerous/bad
| one. I really hope that blue button is a latch reset, but given
| that the process is typically to replace the completed assembly
| in the nest with new unassembled parts, and carry the assembly to
| pack-out (so your hands are full), everyone involved really wants
| to make this system self-resetting so the table indexes when the
| light curtains are restored. Operators and maintenance techs
| (like, I assume, this guy with the giant wrench) will frequently
| be tempted to step over the knee wall and into those two small
| voids adjacent to the dial to reach stuff at the back of the
| table, or put a knee up on the table to reach something. If they
| take their other foot out of the horizontal light curtain, fix
| whatever's broken or interrupt whatever sensor was blocking the
| condition that prevented the dial table from rotating, they're
| going for a ride, which is really, really bad. That kneewall
| should fill the space around the dial so you can't step in the
| corners, and there should be a floor scanner just above the table
| (it can also perform the function of the vertical light curtain)
| to stop the machine when someone's anywhere in the entire volume.
| spieswl wrote:
| Disclosure: Previously worked for an industrial automation
| integrator and currently work for a robotics startup.
|
| Weird paper. Reads like a survey of the state of the art from a
| decade+ ago. Many of the things mentioned are already mature
| areas of focus for startups and major players in the industrial
| robotics space. Many startups are working on the portability,
| ease-of-integration, and ease-of-use problems [0][1]. Cloud-
| oriented tools tailored to robot, line, and facility level
| health-and-status monitoring (even beyond the capabilities
| typically provided by SCADA systems) have been available to buy
| from major players for a long time [2]. I know Big 3 automakers
| have been toying around with integrating collaborative robots for
| years (and another OP already mentioned Rethink). Simulation
| tools run a pretty wide range of usefulness and market
| penetration, from first-party tools like ABB's RobotStudio or
| Fanuc's ROBOGUIDE to tools in the ROS stack to Nvidia's ISAAC
| simulator [3].
|
| To be fair, I only scanned it but I did not detect the hints of
| anything useful except for those who are entirely unfamiliar with
| the industrial manufacturing and robotics space.
|
| [0] https://www.ready-robotics.com/
|
| [1] https://www.olisrobotics.com/
|
| [2] https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-
| us/products/software/f...
|
| [3] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/deep-learning-
| ai/industries/rob...
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(page generated 2021-01-06 23:01 UTC)