Advances in flexible manipulation through the application of AI-based techniques

Résumé

The manufacturing industry was pioneer to incorporate robots to automate costly processes, with the aim of increasing production and reducing costs. Today, robots have a significant presence in almost every industry, generally carrying out simple and repetitive tasks. We are in the transition between Industry 4.0 and 5.0, where in addition to productivity, flexibility is also sought to adjust processes to specific customer needs. Pick and place are two basic operations in practically any robotic application. Conventional robotic pick and place solutions currently in use in industry are characterised by their efficiency in performing simple, repetitive tasks. However, these are very rigid systems, work in completely controlled environments, and are very costly to reprogramme for other tasks. There are currently tasks in various industrial environments (e.g. order generation in a logistics environment) which require flexible handling of objects and which have not yet been automated due to their nature. The main bottlenecks which hinder their automation are the variety of objects to be handled, the lack of robot dexterity and the uncertainty introduced by uncontrolled dynamic environments.