Human–Robot Collaborative Workcell Calibration and Control

As in many areas of today’s evolving industrial production, collaborative robot cells build much of their flexibility and resilience on an integrated model of the entire workcell that represents the actual physical characteristics of the scene with sufficient fidelity to support efficient assessment, planning, and control up to the workcell level. Nominal models of individual workcell components are mostly available, albeit, they often ignore details of secondary importance. Their exact placement within a unified workcell model, as well as their adjustment to the real production scene, remain to be solved as a part of workcell integration. This matching of nominal component models requires calibration methods which rely on measured data and guarantee the required fidelity of a calibrated virtual representation. The chapter introduces theoretical backgrounds and current technological solutions of workcell calibration, and demonstrates the principles by a case study.