A Low-Cost Approach for Robot-to-Robot Cooperation
Lopamudra, S. S. Dhami, Rajesh Kumar · 2024
Industrial robots have become an indispensable part of industry owing to constant increase in performance, accompanied by a steady decline in prices. Availability of robots having high dexterity, multitude of sensors and intelligent controllers opened the way to new paradigms such as robot-to-robot cooperation and human-robot collaboration. Integration of such robotic systems in industry increases efficiency, flexibility, safety and adaptability. However, establishing communication between robots for collaborative or cooperative working is a complicated task requiring either to deploy a centralized control systems to coordinate the actions of multiple robots or to use communication protocols to send coordinate information between robots. In the present paper, a low-cost approach is presented for cooperative working of two articulated robots in which an external IMU sensor provides the joint movements of the master robot to a generic controller which further controls the slave robot joint motors accordingly. Off the shelf available components were used for experimentation. The results validated the proposed hardware solution and algorithm for achieving cooperation between two robots having different types of controllers without any hardware/software interface.