Alwin Hoffmann

Automated cutting and handling of carbon fiber fabrics in aerospace industries

The use of composite components in aerospace industries has become more and more important since the 1980s. Especially structures made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic are well suited for aircrafts where highly stressable but lightweight constructions are required. However, the efficient use of this technology is still limited by a largely manual production process. To increase automation, the paper presents a completely new approach which allows the automated cutting and handling of carbon fiber textiles. This includes a detailed analysis of the current industrial process and its automation potential, the construction of a special handling tool and the development of a suitable automation software. Experimental results show the flexibility and feasibility of the approach.

The Robotics API: An object-oriented framework for modeling industrial robotics applications

During the last two decades, software development has evolved continuously into an engineering discipline with systematic use of methods and tools to model and implement software. For example, object-oriented analysis and design is structuring software models according to real-life objects of the problem domain and their relations. However, the industrial robotics domain is still dominated by old-style, imperative robot programming languages, making software development difficult and expensive. For this reason, we introduce the object-oriented Robotics Application Programming Interface (Robotics API) for developing software for industrial robotic applications. The Robotics API offers an abstract, extensible domain model and provides common functionality, which can be easily used by application developers. The advantages of the Robotics API are illustrated with an application example.

Hiding real-time: A new approach for the software development of industrial robots

The application of industrial robots is strongly limited by the use of old-style robot programming languages. Due to these languages, the development of robotic software is a complex and expensive task requiring technical expertise and time. Hence, the use of industrial robots is often not a question of technical feasibility but of economic efficiency. This paper introduces a new architectural approach making available modern concepts of software engineering for industrial robots. The core idea is to hide the real-time critical robot control from application developers. Instead, common functionality is provided by a generic and extensible application programming interface and can be easily used. Hence, this approach can lead to an industrialization of software development for industrial robotics.

Design of an automation system for preforming processes in aerospace industries

Due to their material properties, carbon fiber-reinforced plastics have become more and more important in aerospace industries since the 1980s. However, their efficient use is still limited by a largely manual manufacturing process. In this paper, we present a novel automation system for preforming and draping dry carbon fiber textiles into a mold. It consists of a multi-functional robot end-effector, which integrates the three essential functions gripping, draping and fixation, as well as a software solution which supports the automation of the process. Experimental results gained on industrial reference toolings show the feasibility and flexibility of the approach.

Interfacing industrial robots using Realtime Primitives

Today, most industrial robots are interfaced using text-based programming languages. These languages offer the possibility to declare robotic-specific data types, to specify simple motions, and to interact with tools and sensors via I/O operations. While tailored to the underlying robot controller, they usually only offer a fixed and controller-specific set of possible instructions. The specification of complex motions, the synchronization of cooperating robots and the advanced use of sensors is often very difficult or not even feasible. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a generic and extensible interface for industrial robots, the Realtime Primitives Interface, as part of a larger software architecture. It allows a flexible specification of complex control instructions and can facilitate the development of sustainable robot controllers. The advantages of this approach are illustrated with several examples.

Developing Self-Organizing Robotic Cells Using Organic Computing Principles

Nowadays industrial robotics applications, which are often designed and planned with a huge amount of effort, have a fixed behavior during runtime and cannot react to changes in their environment. Failures can hardly be compensated and often can only be repaired by human involvement. The idea of Organic Computing is to enable systems to possess life-like properties, such as self-organizing or self-healing. In this chapter we present a layered architecture to bring these two worlds together. Further it is discussed what are the requirements of the respective layers to allow to engineer self-x properties into such systems. The presented approach allows for developing self-organizing robotic applications that are able to take advantage of Organic Computing principles and therefore are more robust and flexible during runtime.

Interactive verification of medical guidelines

In the medical domain, there is a tendency to standardize health care by providing medical guidelines as summary of the best evidence concerning a particular topic. Based on the assumption that guidelines are similar to software, we try to carry over techniques from software engineering to guideline development. In this paper, we show how to apply formal methods, namely interactive verification to improve the quality of guidelines. As an example, we have worked on a guideline from the American Academy of Pediatrics for the management of jaundice in newborns. Contributions of this paper are as follows: (I) a formalized model of a nontrivial example guideline, (II) an approach to verify properties of medical guidelines interactively, and (III) verification of a first example property.

Environment-aware proximity detection with capacitive sensors for human-robot-interaction

Recently, the need for safe human-robot-interaction has become increasingly important, and with it the requirement to reliably detect persons in the workspace of a robot. Capacitive sensors mounted to the robot structure can be used to measure the presence of conductive objects and, hence, allow the detection of persons. However, various objects in the workspace can influence capacitive sensor measurements. Thus, we propose to record an environment model containing the expected sensor values for relevant robot poses. Using this model, distance estimation and real-time reaction can be performed even in the presence of additional conductive objects in the workspace. A demonstration of our approach was shown at the Hannover Messe 2015.

Flexible and continuous execution of real-time critical robotic tasks

Today, industrial robots are usually programmed using specialised programming languages, different for every robot manufacturer. These languages provide good usability, because they are tailored to the functionality traditionally offered by robots. However, these languages are reaching their limits with the growing integration of sensors or multiple robot systems. Therefore, we propose an architecture based on the separation of application control and the execution of real-time robotic tasks. This article describes a flexible and extensible interface for the specification and continuous execution of robotic tasks.

A backward-oriented approach for offline programming of complex manufacturing tasks

The automation of production processes with large process variability and a low batch size can be very difficult and non-economic. Using the example of manufacturing carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers (CFRP) which represents a complex, currently hardly automated process, we present a backward-oriented approach for offline programming of complex manufacturing tasks. We focus on an automatic process definition which is supported by expert knowledge where required. Due to domain specific software modules, user interaction is intuitive and tailored to CFRP experts. This leads to significant time-savings compared to currently used teach-in approaches. Moreover, we introduce an extensible offline programming platform which is able to meet the high requirements of CFRP manufacturing.