A message from the ECHORD coordinator Alois Knoll

Cowboi - Cooperative Welding employing Robot Intelligence

In the COWBOI experiment, an integrated approach for a small lot-size human-robot cooperative welding systems will be developed, implemented and evaluated. The system will enable welding of small lot sizes with manual efforts reduced to a mere interactive, intuitive, fast and highly accurate task specification by the user. This is accomplished in an efficient way, leveraging the system beyond existing cooperative and fully automatic welding systems by combining existing trusted technologies and new promising approaches. One of the major aspects is the broad visual communication interface between the human and the robot system enabling fast task communication. Another key aspect is the increase in robot autonomy, compared to existing approaches, in both task suggestions as well as autonomous task-based movement planning. This relieves the human co-worker from specifying the exact robot movement, a tedious and error-prone task when complex geometries are involved. An additional demand for robot system autonomy is optimizing the exploitation of the redundant degrees of freedom of the actuator, because this cannot be accomplished satisfactory through a human operator.