ECHORD

ECHORD

The EU-funded project ECHORD (European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development) aims to strengthen the cooperation between scientific research and industry in robotics.

Trying to overcome the gap between industrial needs and scientific research in robotics is one of the key issues of the ECHORD project. Especially for defining the future direction of robotic research, the about 50 experiments planned in the ECHORD project shall be groundbreaking. Four research foci have been defined where these experiments have to be applied: “human-robot interfacing and safety”, “robot hands and complex manipulation”, “mobile manipulators and cooperation” and “networked robots”. In a first call the first 14 experiments were evaluated, mainly within the scope “human robot co-worker scenario”. The experiments shall demonstrate the deployment of newest state-of-the-art robot technologies in near future scenarios.

JILAS (Jig-Less Airplane Assembly in low volume production by enhanced human robot interaction) is one of these experiments and has its focus on “human-robot interfacing and safety”. The core of the JILAS experiment is to realize a scenario where a human worker and an industrial robot assemble airplane components in a classical human-robot-coworker manner.

Therefore an industrial robot with newest state of the art safety technology and the ability of performing force controlled movements is used. Additionally, the robot has the capability to be hand guided by grasping and moving the gripped work piece. By the help of this robot the human worker picks up a component and moves it near to the final assembly position (Fig. 1). By the help of an external absolute measurement system the worker acquires the current component positions (Fig. 2) in order to enable the main controller to calculate a robot path to the final position of the gripped component. Then, by command of the human worker, the robot moves the component, possibly force controlled or at least force supervised, to its final position.

The experiment shall deliver information about the general feasibility of this task as well as the profitability of such a scenario.

You can see the current status of the experiment here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_Dh_yXthY

Contact: Richard Hüppi

Experimental partners:
• Pilatus Aircraft LTD, Stans, Switzerland
• MRK - Systeme GmbH, Augsburg, Germany

EU-Project leaders:
• Technische Universität München
• Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
• University of Coimbra, Portugal