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Cooperative robots or “cobots” promise to allow humans and robots to work together more closely while maintaining safety. However, to date the capabilities of cobots are greatly diminished compared to industrial robots in terms of the force and power they are able to safely produce. This is in part due to the actuation choices of cobots. Low impedance robotic actuators aim to solve this problem by attempting to provide an actuator with a combination of low output impedance and a large bandwidth of force control. In short the ideal actuator has a large dynamic range. Existing actuators success and performance has been limited. We propose a high force and high power balanced hybrid active-passive actuator which aims to increase the actuation capability of low impedance actuators and to safely enable high performance larger force and workspace robots. Our balanced hybrid actuator does so, by combining and controlling a series elastic actuator, a small DC motor, and a particle brake in parallel. The actuator provides low and high frequency power producing active torques, along with power absorbing passive torques. Control challenges and advantages of hybrid actuators are discussed and overcome through the use of trajectory optimization, and the safety of the new actuator is evaluated.

The formation of sub-surface defects during friction stir welding has limited the adoption of the process in high volume production. A potential exists to eliminate/reduce the need for costly post weld inspection of such defects through the development of an in-process defect detection method based on a measured process output. The current state of in-process defect detection consists primarily of applying “black box” methods of correlating process outputs to defect occurrence without a fundamental physical understanding of what is producing the change in the output. This approach constrains the application of such methods when altering any aspect of the friction stir welding process. The current study seeks to provide a fundamental physical explanation as to what is driving the oscillation of friction stir welding process forces at the tool rotational frequency, as well as what is occurring when the tool interacts with defects and the oscillatory process forces are altered. A novel understanding was enabled through the synchronization of force measurements with angular position measurements of tool features. The results suggest that the eccentric motion of the tool and/or the rotation of a slanted shoulder surface are the primary drivers of process force oscillations. A fundamental explanation of the interaction between features on the tool probe and defective volumes has been proposed. The physical understanding helps to explain how altering the process will alter the force transients on which the detection method is based, which will enable a more robust and transferable method.

We present situated live programming for human-robot collaboration, an approach that enables users with limited programming experience to program collaborative applications for human-robot interaction. Allowing end users, such as shop floor workers, to program collaborative robots themselves would make it easy to "retask" robots from one process to another, facilitating their adoption by small and medium enterprises. Our approach builds on the paradigm of trigger-action programming (TAP) by allowing end users to create rich interactions through simple trigger-action pairings. It enables end users to iteratively create, edit, and refine a reactive robot program while executing partial programs. This live programming approach enables the user to utilize the task space and objects by incrementally specifying situated trigger-action pairs, substantially lowering the barrier to entry for programming or reprogramming robots for collaboration. We instantiate situated live programming in an authoring system where users can create trigger-action programs by annotating an augmented video feed from the robot's perspective and assign robot actions to trigger conditions. We evaluated this system in a study where participants (n = 10) developed robot programs for solving collaborative light-manufacturing tasks. Results showed that users with little programming experience were able to program HRC tasks in an interactive fashion and our situated live programming approach further supported individualized strategies and workflows. We conclude by discussing opportunities and limitations of the proposed approach, our system implementation, and our study and discuss a roadmap for expanding this approach to a broader range of tasks and applications., Comment: Accepted at UIST 2021, October 10-14, 2021, Virtual Event, USA