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As a controls engineer who has implemented and assisted with dozens of robotic manufacturing cells, the problem isn't the motion planning or compute, it's legacy product support and ease of onboarding new hires. Any given cell may be in production for 10 years - some only for 5, but some for 20 or more - and you need <24 hour response times to any mechanical issues that may arise over that duration. Also, one can't expect that the original programmer will be available to diagnose and debug issues that arise in the field after a year or two, so you need a large pool of technicians and maintenance personnel that can understand the software and be productive in the first hour after being introduced to the machine. None of this is valued by academics, instead, the fundamentals of the process of a single lab trying to prove merit as PhD students and, once that credential is acquired, move on to greener pastures is anathema to both of these ideas. The problem is that academia is working in ROS (now ROS 2), writing Python and VHDL, while the real work in the industry is being done in proprietary vendor tooling that's backwards compatible with training from the 80s. They're proudly advertising touchscreens and full-color 5.7" displays on their teach pendants, as if their customers were still 20 years in the past. Yes, academia, I do want sub-millimeter repeatability, and flawlessly smooth motion planning. I want collision detection that accommodates both the inertia of the arm itself and any end-of-arm tooling, including cable harnesses with distributed loads. I want automatic singularity avoidance and trivial point and frame manipulation. I want 24-bit encoders for resolution, and I want angular velocities to the moon, and to make those work together I need servo loop rates and high-speed skip responses at 1, 2, or 10 kHz. I want 4D stop position prediction to avoid intersection of the robot arm with complex assemblies and safety zones imported from CAD. I want all these things cheaper and faster, with more storage. But I need these to be accessible by Billy Joe, whose only credentials that got him the job in the maintenance department is that he helped out his daddy working with a welder and an old clapped-out Bridgeport on the farm growing up. Billy is probably my best tech on 3rd shift, and he's never learned to type on a full-size keyboard, just his smartphone... and on a robot teach pendant. |
We wrote about this, and raised-funding, and worked for years on it. Hell, we even created an extension of ROS for it called the "Hardware Robot Operating System" (H-ROS) that aimed to address many of these issues you describe using ROS as the common language and Programmable Logic (FPGAs) to deal with physical interfaces. More on this at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8046383.
Problem was that the market didn't really accept it. I still believe on the tech problem landscape in here. I'm just not so sure anymore if there's any real market/business for such a solution. After all, vendor lock-ins are great business, and generate business.