Industrial Manufacturing Automation
Leveraging ROS

Agenda• Scan-N-Plan Evolution• Blending M1 – M4
• Blending M4 (Demo)• Production System• Production System• Overview• Challenges• Solutions

Scan-N-Plan

Evolution

201420162019

Production Systems

Two axis gantry with 6DOF
manipulator.



Size: 6m x 4m



Joint Effort with Integrator


Integrator design and built thesystem



SwRI developed the Scan-N-Plansolution
Offline
OnlineProduction System Offline Component

Add new parts

Define model data

Localization features

Verification features

Save to database

Define job data

Dynamically generateSurface Tool Path

Edge Tool path

Save to database

Ability to reload part and modify dataProduction System Online ComponentProcess

Select parts from databaseScan booth

Localize

Detailed Scan

Motion PlanningPreview and Approval

Execution



LoggingManual Manipulation

Production System Online Component

Manual Manipulation
Open-SourceGroup Selection



Joint and CartesianManipulation

Pkg: tesseract_rviz

Production System Contact Monitoring

In large system it is difficult foroperators to see everything while
manually operating the robot.
Mitigate this risk active contact
monitoring is leverage.
It currently publishes the contact
results at 80hz for the PLC to beable to execute a safe stop toprevent operator error.

Production System Challenges
Modeling System Constraints
Festooning

DCS Joint Exclusion Zones


If (J1 < 10 and J1 > -10) then

J2 > 60 and J2 < 80J3 > -30 and J3 < 40

Configuration

Limit robot extension

Numerical rounding
Programs sent to Robot are at Joint limits or DCS Joint
Limits cause robot faults

ROS Reading state at the same limits causing motion
planning failures

Error Recovery

ROS_SCXML• State machine library based on
Qscxml that loads a scxml statemachine file definition in order to runa FSM.
• It allows attaching custom c++function callbacks to state eventsand can be embeded into a qt gui
application• Open sourced in the near future.

YAK (Yet Another Kinfu)• Improvements• ROS AgnosticModern CMake
Upgraded Cmake
version for better cuda
supportNoether• Tool path generation on wellbehaved surface meshes (picturesabove).
• All waypoints have their z axis
normal to the surface.
• Surface segmentation: can divide amesh into multiple sub-meshes
based on local surface features suchas average normal direction,curvature and distance.

Noether (New)• Filter Pipeline (PointCloud & Meshes)●

Yaml Configuration

Input
Box Crop• B-Spline Surface Reconstruction●

PCL (Must build from source)●

http://pointclouds.org/blog/trcs/moerwald/index.php

Outlier Removal

MLS Smoothing
OutputTesseract (Planning Environment)tesseract_geometry

tesseract_urdf

Support new shape types & Quaternions

tesseract_kinematics (Forward, Inverse, Jacobian)capsule, convex_mesh, sdf_mesh,octomap/PointCloud

IKFast & OPW Kinematics

tesseract_motion_planners
TrajOpt, Descartes & OMPL IntegrationHybrid Planners
Descartes + TrajOpt



OMPL + TrajOpttesseract_ros (Full ROS support)

tesseract_ros2 (ROS2 support - Rviz pending)Tesseract (Planning Environment)●Free-spacetesseract_process_planners––Framework that take a tool pathgenerated on a surface and constructs aprocess tool path.
Process Definition●Start●Segments–●●Approach
ProcessStart

Departure
Transition

Segment (Approach, Process,Departure)

Transitions–From-End–From-Start

EndEndTesseract/TrajOpt• TrajOpt• Dynamic Cartesian Costand constraints
Improvements• Evaluated to low level data
structures for cost andconstraints. Settled on
IFOPT and Eigen AutoDiff• Next Steps Remove
dependency on Tesseract
leveraging TypeErasers

Descartes Light & OPW Kinematics• Descartes Light
IKFast Interface
Gantry sampling
ROS Agnostic• OPW Kinematics
ROS Agnostic

Agile System in Action…
Intuitive Process Application –Registration, Multi-Process
Planning

Contact Information●Levi Armstrong–●●Group Leader

Southwest Research Institute–6220 Culebra Road–San Antonio, Texas 78238

Phone: (210) 522-3801
Email: levi.armstrong@swri.org●

www.swri.org●

www.ros-i.org