Robot Companion for Industrial Process Monitoring Based on Virtual Fixtures

In this paper, the use of a monitoring companion is proposed to more efficiently collect the process information during the tuning of industrial systems, and therefore to assist the system integrator in the optimization process for complex robotic installations. The monitoring companion consists of an industrial manipulator (monitoring robot) and a Unity-ROS framework for controlling it. We discuss in this paper the features that allow the solution to be re-used in different industrial application thanks to its compatibility with ROS. In particular, we present the approach based on admittance virtual fixtures and how we use such abstraction to track a moving target (it could be the end-effector of another robot for example). Moreover, the concept of varying compliance is introduced as a way to influence the motion of the monitoring robot on the virtual fixtures in the presence of obstacles. The experiments have been conducted in simulation as well as on real hardware to test the accuracy of the system at respecting the virtual fixtures with both a static and a moving monitoring target, although in the current implementation the varying compliance was not included in the experiments.