Maintenance automation: methods for robotics manipulation planning and execution

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive robotic system for maintenance automation that integrates planning, interpretation, and execution to handle environmental uncertainties, demonstrated through real-world experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated system combining CAD, RGBD data, and symbolic plan interpretation for maintenance tasks, advancing practical robotic automation.

Findings

Successful execution of maintenance tasks in real-world scenarios

Effective handling of environmental uncertainties during operations

First practical implementation of the proposed theoretical approach

Abstract

Automating complex tasks using robotic systems requires skills for planning, control and execution. This paper proposes a complete robotic system for maintenance automation, which can automate disassembly and assembly operations under environmental uncertainties (e.g. deviations between prior plan information). The cognition of the robotic system is based on a planning approach (using CAD and RGBD data) and includes a method to interpret a symbolic plan and transform it to a set of executable robot instructions. The complete system is experimentally evaluated using real-world applications. This work shows the first step to transfer these theoretical results into a practical robotic solution.