An Intelligent Robotics Modular Architecture for Easy Adaptation to Novel Tasks and Applications

Industrial robots significantly contributed to the increase of quality and productivity in the industry. Still, their deployment and use remain complex and expensive, limiting their main market to mass production in large factories. This article introduces an intelligent robotics framework intended to solve this issue. It relies on a four-layer modular architecture associating a components-agnostic orchestrator coordinating software modules accessed through a standard middleware, and different hardware running the required functions. This architecture is implemented for performing various tasks in autonomy or in collaboration with a human operator, the different components being turned on and adapted on-demand according to the use-case requirements. We illustrate the proposed concept on four robotic sequences: the assembly of a representative gear unit with one arm, the same application with two robots, the Robothon® Grand Challenge and the insertion of deformable objects in a rail.