RBE PhD Dissertation Proposal Defense
Sean McGovern
Constrained Coverage Motion Planning on 3D Freeform Surfaces
Thursday, January 19th
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Zoom Link: https://wpi.zoom.us/j/99319920750
Abstract: There are many industrial robotic applications which require a robot manipulator’s end-effector to fully coverage 3D surface region in a constrained motion. Constrained surface coverage in this context is focused on placing commonly used coverage patterns (such as raster, spiral, or dual-spiral) onto the surface for the manipulator to follow. The manipulator must continuously satisfy surface task constraints imposed on the end-effector while maintaining manipulator joint constraints. While there is substantial research for coverage on planar surfaces, methods for constrained coverage of 3D (spatial) surfaces are limited to certain (parametric or spline) surfaces and do not consider feasibility systematically given manipulator and task constraints. There is a lack of fundamental research to address the general problem: given a manipulator, a 3D freeform surface, and task constraints, whether there exists a feasible continuous motion plan to cover the surface, and if so, how to produce a uniform coverage path that best satisfies task constraints. In this presentation, I introduce a general approach to address this fundamental but largely open coverage problem. We have applied our approach to example 3D freeform surface coverage tasks in simulation and real world environments with a 7-DOF robotic manipulator to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Advisor:
Professor Jing Xiao, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
Committee:
Professor William R. Michalson, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
Professor Emmanuel Agu, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
Professor Berk Calli, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)