Automatic Fingerpad Customization for Precise and Stable Grasping of 3D-Print Parts

The rise in additive manufacturing comes with unique opportunities and challenges. Massive part customization and rapid design changes are made possible with additive manufacturing, however, manufacturing industries that desire the implementation of robotics automation to improve production efficiency could face challenges in the gripper design and grasp planning due to highly complex geometrical shapes resulting from massive part customization. Yet, current gripper design for such objects are often manual and rely on ad-hoc design intuition. This would be limiting as such grippers would lack the ability to grasp different objects or grasp points, which is important for practical implementations. Hence, we introduce a fast, end-to-end approach to customize rigid gripper fingerpads that could achieve precise and stable grasping for different objects at multiple grasp points. Our approach relies on two key components: (i) a method based on set Boolean operations, e.g. intersections, subtractions, and unions to extract object features and synthesize gripper surfaces that conform to different local shapes to form caging grasps; (ii) a method to evaluate the grasp quality of synthesized grippers. We experimentally demonstrate the validity of our approach by synthesizing fingerpads that, once mounted on a physical robot gripper, are able to grasp different objects at multiple grasp points, all with tightly constrained grasps.

Grasping, Part Identification, and Pose Refinement in One Shot with a Tactile Gripper

The rise in additive manufacturing comes with unique opportunities and challenges. Rapid changes to part design and massive part customization distinctive to 3D-Print (3DP) can be easily achieved. Customized parts that are unique, yet exhibit similar features such as dental moulds, shoe insoles, or engine vanes could be industrially manufactured with 3DP. However, the opportunity for massive part customization comes with unique challenges for the existing production paradigm of robotics applications, as the current robotics paradigm for part identification and pose refinement is repetitive, where data-driven and object-dependent approaches are often used. Thus, a bottleneck exists in robotics applications for 3DP parts where massive customization is involved, as it is difficult for feature-based deep learning approaches to distinguish between similar parts such as shoe insoles belonging to different people. As such, we propose a method that augments patterns on 3DP parts so that grasping, part identification, and pose refinement can be executed in one shot with a tactile gripper. We also experimentally evaluate our approach from three perspectives, including real insertion tasks that mimic robotic sorting and packing, and achieved excellent classification results, a high insertion success rate of 95%, and a sub-millimeter pose refinement accuracy.

Development of a robotic system for automatic organic chemistry synthesis

Automated chemical synthesis carries great promises of safety, efficiency and reproducibility for both research and industry laboratories. Current approaches are based on specifically-designed automation systems, which present two major drawbacks: (i) existing apparatus must be modified to be integrated into the automation systems; (ii) such systems are not flexible and would require substantial re-design to handle new reactions or procedures. In this paper, we propose a system based on a robot arm which, by mimicking the motions of human chemists, is able to perform complex chemical reactions without any modifications to the existing setup used by humans. The system is capable of precise liquid handling, mixing, filtering, and is flexible: new skills and procedures could be added with minimum effort. We show that the robot is able to perform a Michael reaction, reaching a yield of 34%, which is comparable to that obtained by a junior chemist (undergraduate student in Chemistry).