Francesco BASILE | Automation

Mission

The laboratory activities can be divided into two main topics: robotics and industrial automation.

Robotics. Within this field, activities concern the testing of control laws for industrial robots and cooperating robotic cells as well as the distributed control of multi-robot systems.

Automation. In this context, prototyping of control architectures for industrial automation is carried out, as well as the use of advanced simulators for the optimization of discrete event systems such as flexible processing cells, handling systems and urban traffic.

The laboratory has been used in consolidated collaborations with industries such as Leonardo-Finmeccanica, Loccioni and Comau-Robotics.

There are 3 anthropomorphic industrial robots with 6 degrees of freedom, two of which are mounted on a moving track creating a cooperating cell with 14 degrees of freedom; robot controllers with open control architecture, which allow partial or total replacement of the factory control software with the one to be tested; an automatic warehouse prototype equipped with conveyors and elevators; programmable logic controllers and supervisory stations.

Activities

Distributed control of multi-robot systems

In the context of multi-robot system control, the lack of a central processing unit and the resulting locality of information poses several problems from the point of view of the control of each agent. Decentralized control partially overcomes this limit. For this purpose, a useful tool is the graph theory, in which each robot is modeled as a node of the network and the exchange of information between agents as an arc. In this context, the research activity developed consists in the development of control-type laws of the type-observer-controller in which the purpose of the observer is to estimate the total (not directly known) state of the system, while the controller uses such estimate for the calculation of the local control law. In the same area, fault diagnosis, detection and accommodation are studied.

Control of cooperating manipulators
The research activity consists in the kinematic control of cooperating robot systems starting from the description of the task to be performed. The kinematic control first involves a kinematic inversion to pass from a trajectory assigned in the operating space to the corresponding trajectories for each manipulators’ joints and then the use of a joint controller that can be either of the independent-joint or model-based control. The attractiveness of this type of control lies in using standard controllers for the joint-level robots and the possibility of exploiting any redundancy that may be present by adding additional constraints in the kinematic inversion.

Force control of manipulators
The activity consists in the development of control algorithms that manage the interaction of the manipulator with the environment. Moreover, in the case of two or more manipulators manipulating a common object, there is the problem of controlling both internal stresses that produce deformations on the object and the forces of interaction between object and environment.

Robotic drilling
In aeronautics, the use of industrial robots for operations currently carried out manually by expert operators would produce a significant reduction in production times and an improvement in quality. The laboratory is equipped to experiment robotized drilling of aeronautical panels. In this activity, one of the robots is equipped with a drilling end-effector, while the other has the task of stiffening the panel locally, so as to improve the quality of the drilling.

Control and supervision of handling systems

The automation of production processes represents one of the most significant application themes .This is essentially due to the structural complexity of the production systems and to the multiplicity of functionalities that characterize its behavior. In particular, the problem of automatic handling and storage is central to the manufacturing systems since they play a key role in the optimization of manufacturing systems as a whole.
The research activity is focused on the development of real-time control algorithms aimed at optimizing the performance of each handling subsystem in an automated system. In this regard, each local controller (based on the knowledge of the system status) must face problems such: definition of loading sequences, determination of loading time, choice of routing for each piece, management of priorities among pieces that require the use of the same resource at the same time
The warehouse prototype installed at the laboratory allows the experimental verification of what has been achieved on widely used machines, allowing to match the theoretical objectives of the research with those of practical implementation.

Teaching

The laboratory provides didactic support for the courses

• Robotics
• Automation
• Information Technologies for Control Systems
• Design of Control Systems

The laboratory also hosts thesis and post-graduate activities for undergraduates and graduates in Computer Engineering, and for Ph.D. students in Information Engineering. Many of these activities include the participation of students in research and development projects, including experimental ones, and are supported by scholarships, research grants and collaboration contracts financed by the University and by companies and often carried out in an international context.

Instrumentation
In the laboratory are present:

2 Comau SmartSix anthropomorphic robots
1 UR10 robot (Universal Robot)
1 Kinect sensor
1 high resolution CMOS sensor
3 force / torque sensors
4 grippers with two or three fingers
1 electric two-finger gripper
1 Automatic warehouse for industrial automation
6 PC workstations

Photos and more information are available on the group's website www.automatica.unisa.it