Technologies for the Fast Set-Up of Automated Assembly Processes

In this article, we describe technologies facilitating the set-up of automated assembly solutions which have been developed in the context of the IntellAct project (2011–2014). Tedious procedures are currently still required to establish such robot solutions. This hinders especially the automation of so called few-of-a-kind production. Therefore, most production of this kind is done manually and thus often performed in low-wage countries. In the IntellAct project, we have developed a set of methods which facilitate the set-up of a complex automatic assembly process, and here we present our work on tele-operation, dexterous grasping, pose estimation and learning of control strategies. The prototype developed in IntellAct is at a TRL4 (corresponding to ‘demonstration in lab environment’).