Force-base Door Sealing Assembly - EuRoC Challenge - Winning Application
Channel: FZIchannel
Date: 2021-12-21

Automation in the automotive industry is already well established. Nevertheless, there are still tasks that are very difficult for robots to implement. For example, tasks with flexible materials and difficult programming, such as the mounting of a car door sealing with time-consuming programming of the positions of the individual pins. New solutions are required to make automation of such tasks possible and profitable. 
By using an intuitive user interface, force based control of an industrial robot and a special safety concept, it was possible to solve such a usecase, which is otherwise done manually.
This work was done as part of the European Robotics Challenge (EuRoC). The integration of common hardware and safety approaches, combined with innovative state of the art software components enabled the successful implementation of the use case and was awarded the first place in the challenge.

A KUKA KR16 was equipped with a force torque sensor, a gripper, and a mechanism for pressing in the plastic pins. The hybrid safety concept combined from traditional plc and reactive robot control in ROS allows a user to walk into the robot's workspace at any time, as the robot seamlessly reduces its speed to zero when the user enters the workspace.

On the software side, the Robot Operating System (ROS) was used to control the overall system. In addition to adaptive speed control based on the safety system and force-regulated control for pin insertion an intuitive user interface made it possible to program the corresponding door seal in under 15 minutes.