Set-based Control for Autonomous Spray Painting
For industrial robotics, this method offers a practical way to optimize painting tasks without compromising quality.
The paper presents a set-based control method to reduce energy consumption and increase speed of robotic spray painting by allowing a small deviation in spray angle, achieving substantial improvements over standard solutions.
In this paper, a method is presented for lowering the energy consumption and/or increasing the speed of a standard manipulator spray painting a surface. The approach is based on the observation that a small angle between the spray direction and the surface normal does not affect the quality of the paint job. Recent results in set-based kinematic control are utilized to develop a switched control system, where this angle is defined as a set-based task with a maximum allowed limit. Four different set-based methods are implemented and tested on a UR5 manipulator from Universal Robots. Experimental results verify the correctness of the method, and demonstrate that the set-based approaches can substantially lower the paint time and energy consumption compared to the current standard solution.