Control of a nonholonomic robot in an environment with obstacles

The industrial collaborative scenario is experiencing several changes, due to the influence of the new working paradigms introduced by the fourth technological revolution. In the proposed application, a cobot and a human agent have to collaborate to assemble the components of a thermostatic valve. The cobot is endowed with a cognitive unit, Smart Robots, equipped with artificial intelligence algorithms that enable it to recognize the latent co-worker intention and promote a proactive cooperation with the human partner, as well as adapting to his/her observed behaviour. Moreover, to facilitate the mutual understanding of the two agents and the fluency of the coop- eration, the application exploits the recent advances in terms of mixed-reality technologies, Microsoft HoloLens, to create a visual holographic communication channel with the co-worker. This mixed-reality wearable head-set is used to display in the operator field of view intuitive and easy-to-understand information in the form of holographic task-related projections through which he/she can be guided, assisted and warn during the various phases of the overall collaboration. Consistently with the paradigm of Industry 4.0, whose cornerstones are the flexibility and the strong interconnection among the industrial devices, the collaborative station has been endowed with ultra-fast 5G connectivity, so as to guarantee a highly reliable and very low latency data exchange between the devices. This collaborative task has proved its efficiency in terms of robustness to error propagation and cycle-time.