KittingBot: A Mobile Manipulation Robot for Collaborative Kitting in Automotive Logistics
This addresses the manual labor-intensive task of kitting for automotive logistics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing robotic platforms and focuses on collaborative integration.
The paper tackles the problem of automating kitting in automotive logistics, where parts are collected for individualized car manufacturing, by developing a mobile manipulation robotic system that demonstrated autonomous kitting, part recognition, and obstacle avoidance in a competition setting.
Individualized manufacturing of cars requires kitting: the collection of individual sets of part variants for each car. This challenging logistic task is frequently performed manually by warehouseman. We propose a mobile manipulation robotic system for autonomous kitting, building on the Kuka Miiwa platform which consists of an omnidirectional base, a 7 DoF collaborative iiwa manipulator, cameras, and distance sensors. Software modules for detection and pose estimation of transport boxes, part segmentation in these containers, recognition of part variants, grasp generation, and arm trajectory optimization have been developed and integrated. Our system is designed for collaborative kitting, i.e. some parts are collected by warehouseman while other parts are picked by the robot. To address safe human-robot collaboration, fast arm trajectory replanning considering previously unforeseen obstacles is realized. The developed system was evaluated in the European Robotics Challenge 2, where the Miiwa robot demonstrated autonomous kitting, part variant recognition, and avoidance of unforeseen obstacles.