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Commands hive drawit6/27/2023 ![]() The scripting language for the UR is also very, very simple to learn and to use.WFE will load from the specified folder any. With our larger industrial robots, there’s often extra steps or extra software that’s required in order to sidestep whatever native controls are built into the robot, which is not the case here. We were able to simplify all of our commands into a single string that we could send to the robot,” she says. “Building the HIVE meant working in a bunch of different coding languages and environments across teams and devices. His colleague Heather Kerrick recounts how the HIVE project benefited from the robot’s open architecture as well. “We were able to get pretty low-level control of the UR robots using the streaming API over TCP communication, which was vital to our particular needs as we needed to directly access the by robot bypassing the robot’s own operating system,” explains the software architect. Quick progress was also facilitated by the UR robots’ open APIs. This was very important for us to make progress in this project.” ![]() I could literally connect the robot to my laptop, work next to it, and quickly iterate through our experiments without worrying about safety protocols slowing things down. “One of the major reasons we chose Universal Robots is because it’s safe to work around. “The next iteration is to actually start assembling designs, for example a house out of Legos or a toy giraffe, and then have the robot automatically build it,” explains Yotto Koga, Software Architect at Autodesk, emphasizing how the ability to work right next to the robot in this process is imperative. The final placement is also vision-guided by a second UR robot, a UR5, holding a camera to check the brick assembly. If the brick is grasped in the wrong position for placement, the UR10 performs a visual survey and can re-position and re-grasp the brick until it is correctly placed in the gripper. Using vision guidance, the robot can pick out a pre-defined brick in a jumble of different sizes and colors. “But with the Universal Robots, we were able to be a little more daring with our research because we could trust that the robot wouldn’t break itself, and wouldn’t pose a danger to others.” The Autodesk team successfully built the HIVE in three days.Īnother construction industry challenge now addressed in Autodesk’s research with the UR robots is developing a smart assembly system with the team’s “Brick-Bot” tackling three sub-problems: bin-picking, re-grasping and placement. “We’re doing experimental research where the robots are moving based on real-time sensor data, so the chance of the robot doing something unexpected is really high,” explains Kerrick, adding that had her team used a larger, more industrial robot, they wouldn’t have been able to engage with the public in the same way and it would have been a much slower research project. “The UR robots were able to offer very precise movements and very precise measurements that would have been difficult for a human to do on-site, so the human didn’t need anywhere near as many measuring tools or equipment,” says Kerrick, while also emphasizing the safety aspect. The Hive Pavilion was built at “winding stations” where attendees fastened three random pieces of bamboo onto a Universal Robot that generated the necessary movement sequence to hook fiber on the tips of the bamboo to create a unique, tumble weed-looking tensegrity element. “We were really proud of our ability to empower the robot by giving it sensors and decision-making abilities and then act on that accordingly.” “When we started, we weren’t really sure to what extent we could work with our robot and help it understand the uncertainty and the variability that we were giving it,” explains Heather Kerrick, Senior Research Engineer at Autodesk’s Robotics Lab. Raw bamboo is a very uneven, bendable material with different lengths and widths. The goal was for users to experience a seamless integration between robotic manufacturing, wearables, RFID tracking, and intelligence embedded in the building pieces. The HIVE was a pavilion built out of raw bamboo and fiber string in close collaboration between conference attendees at Autodesk University, ICD University of Stuttgart, Autodesk Robotics Lab, and UR robots. The HIVE Pavilion – Human-Robot interaction The solution & The HIVE Pavilion – Human-Robot interactionĪutodesk’s Robotics Lab is using Universal Robots’ collaborative robot arms (cobots) to address these challenges in research projects spanning human-robot interactions, machine learning, drawing and smart assembly systems.
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