Autonomy for Automotive General Assembly

Given an assembly task as specified by a sequence of subtasks, an autonomous assembly system is capable to achieve the specified goal within a known or unknown environment, without human interaction, from an initial unknown location, with uncertain sensing, uncertain execution, and uncertain actuation. Given an automotive general assembly task and its associated environment, autonomous assembly research project seeks to investigate, identify, and solve fundamental problems that prevent achieving 100% task autonomy based on our experience in last 10 plus years developing various robotic systems from walking robots, indoor mobile robots, social robots, and more recently, to multi-robot systems and robotic assembly. For this project, we will apply and extend the ideas we have developed into the area of autonomous automotive general assembly. In particular, we will focus on low-payload, highdexterity tasks, such as wiring harness installation or assembling dashboards. We will investigate autonomous performance in tasks that have a reasonably high amount of uncertainty. For the behavioral level, we will pursue force control for reliable placement and validation of task completion. We will also investigate integrated mobility and manipulation while dealing with a moving target, which will extend our previous work in combined mobility and manipulation. For the executive level, we will investigate how to structure such low-payload, high-dexterity tasks in terms of decomposition to primitive actions and trajectory planning in confined spaces. We will identify and investigate factors that prevent achieving 100% autonomous assembly. We will also focus on the need for very high reliability, especially in detecting anomalous situations and recovering from errors.