Set-based Control for Autonomous Spray Painting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a set-based control method for autonomous spray painting that reduces energy use and increases speed by allowing flexible spray angles, verified through experiments on a UR5 robot.

Contribution

It presents a novel switched control system utilizing set-based kinematic control to optimize spray angles, improving efficiency over standard methods.

Findings

Significant reduction in paint time

Lower energy consumption

Effective control on UR5 manipulator

Abstract

In this paper, a method is presented for lowering the energy consumption and/or increasing the speed of a standard manipulator spray painting a surface. The approach is based on the observation that a small angle between the spray direction and the surface normal does not affect the quality of the paint job. Recent results in set-based kinematic control are utilized to develop a switched control system, where this angle is defined as a set-based task with a maximum allowed limit. Four different set-based methods are implemented and tested on a UR5 manipulator from Universal Robots. Experimental results verify the correctness of the method, and demonstrate that the set-based approaches can substantially lower the paint time and energy consumption compared to the current standard solution.