Six to ten years ago, exhibitors at Automate were promoting bin-picking in many, many booths. Bin picking wasn’t mentioned this year because it is an available option these days. For the last six years vendors have been promoting human-robot collaboration in manufacturing. Here’s what I saw this year at the big Automate and ProMat trade shows held last month in Chicago.

Chicago’s huge McCormick Place Conference Center was once again home to the Automate and ProMat trade shows: Automate for robotics; ProMat for material handling solutions. Over 900 exhibitors covered 350,000 sq ft at ProMat while 400+ companies exhibited at the Automate show.

Vendors appeared to be in the process of defining a broader definition of collaboration which includes all non-industrial robotics (mobile or stationary; manufacturing or service; professional or personal) in any way involving human-robot interaction. The interaction could be as little as different colored lights or as much as direct handling of materials back and forth to robots side-by-side on an assembly line.

Universal Robots (UR), the collaborative robot pioneer, has sold over 12,000 of their co-bots worldwide in their short career (they sold 52 in 2009). 2016 sales were 60% greater than 2015 and their goal for 2017 is 80% to 100% over 2016. UR’s booth, the biggest at Automate, was consistently crowded and noisy. Lots of attentive interest.

Recently UR added an app store for co-bot accessories, grippers and cameras. They presently offer 20 products but expect to have an additional 80 in the store by the end of 2017.

Another sign of UR’s success was the use of their robots in other vendor’s booths – 25 different exhibitors demonstrated their products with UR robots. Intelligrated used a UR to demonstrate their goods-to-picker application; Creaform used one equipped with their HandySCAN to demonstrate 3D scanning and inspection applications; ATI Industrial Automation used another UR outfitted with ATI’s multi-axis force sensor; Schunk used a UR to demonstrate their new CoAct EGP gripper (read more about this interesting gripper below) as did Robotiq, which used 3 UR’s to demonstrate their grippers, wrist cameras and force torque sensors.

Up until this year UR has had few active competitors. Most seemed to be waiting to see whether there’s a real market for these types of smaller, slower, less robust robots. They weren’t actively marketing their co-bot products.

• ABB and their two-armed YuMi (2-3 times as expensive as a UR)
• Fanuc’s CR-35iA, a green (for safe) soft-covered co-bot that can handle payloads of up to 75 pounds
• Kawada’s two-armed Nextage
• pi4 Robotics‘ Workerbots
• Kuka’s LBR iiwa which recently lowered its price to $60k
• Precise Automation’s SCARA and Cartesian desktop co-bots
• Rethink Robotics Baxter and Sawyer

UR and Rethink proved beyond doubt that there’s a willing marketplace for effective low-cost co-bot products, and the other companies are planning to take advantage of their many years of education and promotion. 2017 is the year many of the above companies – and many more new entrants – are beginning to seriously market into the industrial space. Here are some of the new co-bot entrants:

• The Aubo i5 (from the company that used to be called Smokie) looks like and has almost identical specs when compared to a UR5 except that it’s price is $10,000 less expensive and it has an open software system with ROS support.
• ABB plans to release a renamed version of the popular one-armed gomTec Roberta robot which was pulled from the market when ABB acquired gomTec.
• Bosch’s APAS which, although used internally for years is just beginning to be commercially marketed.
• Schunk’s stylish blue Powerball arm has been highlighted at every trade show so far this year.
• Denso is releasing their tiny desktop co-bot Cobotta.
• Kawasaki Robot is launching their duAro dual-arm SCARA co-bot and was using that co-bot to cone up and hand out soft-serve ice cream.
• Comau is launching their slick Racer 3 and 5 arms using their optional AURA add-on safety system.
• The highly anticipated Franka Emika $12,150 package of arm, gripper, teaching device and graphical software is already being delivered to academic clients. Commercial deliveries are expected shortly after this year’s Hannover Messe trade show.
• Staubli is launching their TX2 series of robot arms made safe by the optional use of their CS9 safety control system.
• And many more (read this article: 42 companies empowering robots and humans to work side-by-side).

Collaborative robots need safe, sensitive and flexible end-of-arm-tooling (EOAT) and there were many vendors – and some breakthrough technologies – demonstrated at the two shows. Details here: Smart grasping demonstrated at Automate and ProMat trade shows.

The NAIST OpenHand M2S was developed by a team of students as part of the school’s annual CICP project (read the blog post about it here), in which students can propose and organize their own research projects. Based on the Yale OpenHand M2, the NAIST OpenHand M2S was developed for textile manipulation, sensitive grasping as well as pinpoint pushing with high loads. All of the parts (except motors, sensors etc.) can be downloaded from here and 3D printed.

For grasping and manipulation, the hand is equipped with two 3D force sensors that act as fingertips. Using these, the hand can gently grasp textiles and let them glide through its fingers, pull them taut when tension is required, and even recognize different materials. By rubbing its fingertips together, a force signal is generated which allows the hand to sense if it successfully grasped a textile, and which kind of material it is.

Lastly, the rigid finger of the hand allows it to push with high loads and tuck into small openings. This can be used for tasks like making a bed, but also during the manufacturing of a car or airplane seat, which is part of the team’s research. Future versions of the hand will be able to pick up thin objects from a table easily without moving the robot.

You can read the conference paper here. Download the 3D files here, to use the gripper in your own research.

If you liked this article, you may also enjoy these:

• Robotics, maths, python: A fledgling computer scientist’s guide to inverse kinematics
• Python programming your NAO robot
• Soft robotic gripper can pick up and identify wide array of objects
• Sticky business: Five adhesives tested for 3D printing
• 3-D printing hydraulically-powered robots, no assembly required

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

From early childhood, when a person picks up an object using their hands they use haptic feedback to automatically adjust the force of their grip according to the object they are lifting. A completely different grip is required when holding a soft piece of fruit or a glass ornament – both very delicate in their own ways. Your body will automatically adjust to the appropriate grip by sensing small shear movements and exploiting the natural compliance of the soft, fleshy pads of your finger tips to do so. Equipping robotic grippers with this level of compliance and versatility has long been a problem, but in a paper published in Advanced Materials, a team from LMTS and LIS, EPFL and NCCR Robotics proposes a solution with a simple control input that has been used to pick up diverse objects including a raw chicken egg, a water balloon and a flat piece of paper.

While most robotic grippers are designed for the type of object they will pick up, the versatility of this two-fingered version comes from its ability to maximise electroadhesion and electrostatic actuation while allowing self-sensing through newly designed bending dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs). Electroadhesion force alternates holding force to pick up heavier objects, and minimises required mechanical grasping force generated from electrostatic actuation, allowing the gripper to handle very fragile and deformable objects and a wide variety of shapes.

The key novelty that allows this new gripper to behave differently is the arrangement of electrodes within the DEA. Traditionally, DEAs function through a thin elastomer membrane sandwiched between two highly compliant, uniform parallel electrodes. When a voltage is applied across the membrane the opposing charges on the electrodes generate electrostatic pressure, which in turn leads to thickness reduction and area expansion, resulting in bending actuation.

For DEA actuation, electric fields inside the membrane normal to the surface are usually the only ones considered, but not the only ones produced: Fringe electrical fields are created at the electrode edge, which can bring about electroadhesion in nearby objects.

In order to exploit the electroadhesion and the electrostatic actuation of the DEA, four compliant electrodes are interwoven in a way that causes adjacent electrode segments on the same planar surface to orientate with the opposite polarity nearest. Thus, when a voltage is applied, the fringe electric fields are experienced across the whole DEA, rather than just at the edges, leading to electroactuation forces being increased tenfold.

The simple structure of the gripper means that it is lightweight (approx. 1.5g), fast functioning (approx. 100ms to close the fingers), and has a design flexibility for potential applications such as small transportation drones, the food industry and medical robotics.

References

J. Shintake, S. Rosset, B. Schubert, D. Floreano and H. Shea, “Versatile soft grippers with intrinsic electroadhesion based on multifunctional polymer actuators,” Advanced Materials, 2015. doi:10.1002/adma.201504264

All photographs courtesy of Alain Herzog and NCCR Robotics.