Digital twin-and extended reality-based telepresence for collaborative robot programming in the 6G perspective

In the context of Industry 4.0,a paradigm shift from traditional industrial manipulators to Collaborative Robots(CRs)is ongoing,with the latter serving ever more closely humans as auxiliary tools in many production processes.In this scenario,continuous technological advancements offer new opportunities for further innovating robotics and other areas of next-generation industry.For example,6G could play a prominent role due to its human-centric view of the industrial domains.In particular,its expected dependability features will pave the way for new applications exploiting highly effective Digital Twin(DT)-and eXtended Reality(XR)-based telepresence.In this work,a novel application for the above technologies allowing two distant users to collaborate in the programming of a CR is proposed.The approach encompasses demanding data flows(e.g.,point cloud-based streaming of collaborating users and robotic environment),with network latency and bandwidth constraints.Results obtained by analyzing this approach from the viewpoint of network requirements in a setup designed to emulate 6G connectivity indicate that the expected performance of forthcoming mobile networks will make it fully feasible in principle.

Assessment of Potentially Attractive Tasks to Collaborative Robotics Application:A Case Study Based on Electronics Industry

The use of robotics in the electronics industry has been of great importance to raise productivity and quality levels.When compared to the classic industrial robots,the collaborative ones present themselves as a trend,bringing greater flexibility,improving ergonomics,shortening implementation time and degree of configurability.However,the correct definition of their use,when compared to industrial robots,still needs more understanding and discussion so as not to become an intuitive process.The objective of this work is to present a methodology based on a time and motion study to define the tasks which have the greatest potential to be automated and to be implemented with simplicity.To validate this methodology,two consecutive stations of a packaging assembly line of smartphones were considered.The obtained results show feasibility and applicability in the tested solution,allowing it to be applied in other situations.

Towards Collaborative Robotics in Top View Surveillance:A Framework for Multiple Object Tracking by Detection Using Deep Learning

Collaborative Robotics is one of the high-interest research topics in the area of academia and industry.It has been progressively utilized in numerous applications,particularly in intelligent surveillance systems.It allows the deployment of smart cameras or optical sensors with computer vision techniques,which may serve in several object detection and tracking tasks.These tasks have been considered challenging and high-level perceptual problems,frequently dominated by relative information about the environment,where main concerns such as occlusion,illumination,background,object deformation,and object class variations are commonplace.In order to show the importance of top view surveillance,a collaborative robotics framework has been presented.It can assist in the detection and tracking of multiple objects in top view surveillance.The framework consists of a smart robotic camera embedded with the visual processing unit.The existing pre-trained deep learning models named SSD and YOLO has been adopted for object detection and localization.The detection models are further combined with different tracking algorithms,including GOTURN,MEDIANFLOW,TLD,KCF,MIL,and BOOSTING.These algorithms,along with detection models,help to track and predict the trajectories of detected objects.The pre-trained models are employed;therefore,the generalization performance is also investigated through testing the models on various sequences of top view data set.The detection models achieved maximum True Detection Rate 93%to 90%with a maximum 0.6%False Detection Rate.The tracking results of different algorithms are nearly identical,with tracking accuracy ranging from 90%to 94%.Furthermore,a discussion has been carried out on output results along with future guidelines.

Robot Zero-Moment Control Algorithm Based on Parameter Identification of Low-Speed Dynamic Balance

This paper proposes a zero-moment control torque compensation technique.After compensating the gravity and friction of the robot,it must overcome a small inertial force to move in compliance with the external force.The principle of torque balance was used to realise the zero-moment dragging and teaching function of the lightweight collaborative robot.The robot parameter identification based on the least square method was used to accurately identify the robot torque sensitivity and friction parameters.When the robot joint rotates at a low speed,it can approximately satisfy the torque balance equation.The experiment uses the joint position and the current motor value collected during the whole moving process under the low-speed dynamic balance as the excitation signal to realise the parameter identification.After the robot was compensated for gravity and static friction,more precise torque control was realised.The zero-moment dragging and teaching function of the robot was more flexible,and the drag process was smoother.

Gaze Estimation via a Differential Eyes’Appearances Network with a Reference Grid

A person’s eye gaze can effectively express that person’s intentions.Thus,gaze estimation is an important approach in intelligent manufacturing to analyze a person’s intentions.Many gaze estimation methods regress the direction of the gaze by analyzing images of the eyes,also known as eye patches.However,it is very difficult to construct a person-independent model that can estimate an accurate gaze direction for every person due to individual differences.In this paper,we hypothesize that the difference in the appearance of each of a person’s eyes is related to the difference in the corresponding gaze directions.Based on this hypothesis,a differential eyes’appearances network(DEANet)is trained on public datasets to predict the gaze differences of pairwise eye patches belonging to the same individual.Our proposed DEANet is based on a Siamese neural network(SNNet)framework which has two identical branches.A multi-stream architecture is fed into each branch of the SNNet.Both branches of the DEANet that share the same weights extract the features of the patches;then the features are concatenated to obtain the difference of the gaze directions.Once the differential gaze model is trained,a new person’s gaze direction can be estimated when a few calibrated eye patches for that person are provided.Because personspecific calibrated eye patches are involved in the testing stage,the estimation accuracy is improved.Furthermore,the problem of requiring a large amount of data when training a person-specific model is effectively avoided.A reference grid strategy is also proposed in order to select a few references as some of the DEANet’s inputs directly based on the estimation values,further thereby improving the estimation accuracy.Experiments on public datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-theart methods.

Optimization and Design of Cloud-Edge-End Collaboration Computing for Autonomous Robot Control Using 5G and Beyond

Robots have important applications in industrial production, transportation, environmental monitoring and other fields, and multi-robot collaboration is a research hotspot in recent years. Multi-robot autonomous collaborative tasks are limited by communication, and there are problems such as poor resource allocation balance, slow response of the system to dynamic changes in the environment, and limited collaborative operation capabilities. The combination of 5G and beyond communication and edge computing can effectively reduce the transmission delay of task offloading and improve task processing efficiency. First, this paper designs a robot autonomous collaborative computing architecture based on 5G and beyond and mobile edge computing(MEC).Then, the robot cooperative computing optimization problem is studied according to the task characteristics of the robot swarm. Then, a reinforcement learning task offloading scheme based on Qlearning is further proposed, so that the overall energy consumption and delay of the robot cluster can be minimized. Finally, simulation experiments demonstrate that the method has significant performance advantages.

WARA-PS:a research arena for public safety demonstrations and autonomous collaborative rescue robotics experimentation

A research arena(WARA-PS)for sensing,data fusion,user interaction,planning and control of collaborative autonomous aerial and surface vehicles in public safety applications is presented.The objective is to demonstrate scientific discoveries and to generate new directions for future research on autonomous systems for societal challenges.The enabler is a computational infrastructure with a core system architecture for industrial and academic collaboration.This includes a control and command system together with a framework for planning and executing tasks for unmanned surface vehicles and aerial vehicles.The motivating application for the demonstration is marine search and rescue operations.A state-of-art delegation framework for the mission planning together with three specific applications is also presented.The first one concerns model predictive control for cooperative rendezvous of autonomous unmanned aerial and surface vehicles.The second project is about learning to make safe real-time decisions under uncertainty for autonomous vehicles,and the third one is on robust terrain-aided navigation through sensor fusion and virtual reality tele-operation to support a GPS-free positioning system in marine environments.The research results have been experimentally evaluated and demonstrated to industry and public sector audiences at a marine test facility.It would be most difficult to do experiments on this large scale without the WARA-PS research arena.Furthermore,these demonstrator activities have resulted in effective research dissemination with high public visibility,business impact and new research collaborations between academia and industry.