Funded Projects

Existing manufacturing system has shown its limited resilience to a pandemic such as COVID-19. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, first responders faced the immediate loss of critical equipment inventories such as personal protective equipment. One main reason is that most of the existing manufacturing lines, such as automotive assembly lines, are rigid and fixed, and the robots are programmed to conduct repetitive tasks. It is extremely expensive to adapt existing manufacturing lines for new products that are suddenly subject to high demand due to pandemics as the current robot system is not agile enough to handle various types of tasks. The goal of this project is to enable the adaptation of robots to new tasks rapidly by establishing a holistic approach for robot system design and adaptation, which requires automatic selection of the planning and control parameters for specific tasks. We will particularly formulate it into an optimization problem and overcome the high dimensionality challenge. The approach will be evaluated experimentally on a universal robotic system with human workers as collaborators in the loop.