Smart Drill: an Autonomous Drilling End-Effector with Embedded Sensing and Intelligence for Mobile and Collaborative Robots

Robotic drilling is a widespread task in industry. Custom-designed end-effectors often improve machining performances. However, there are few examples of specialised drilling end-effectors for collaborative and unstructured environments. We present the Smart Drill, an end-effector for cobots and mobile manipulators that enables autonomous drilling operations. Its mechanical parts are 3D printed and its components are easily acquired. The Smart Drill is equipped with integrated sensors, an embedded computation unit, robot-independent power management and multiple-standard mechanical couplings. The embedded software abstracts communication, sensory processing and task management to a higher level directly on the end-effector, avoiding the necessity of robot-specific drivers or communication protocols. We employ its features in a semi-autonomous collaborative drilling task: the Smart Drill commands the arm of a humanoid robot to align with a surface and drills on points identified through its sensing system.