System Concept for Human-Robot Collaborative Draping

Draping is a technically complicated process as it involves the placing of a flat piece of carbon fiber fabric in a 3D mold, without creating wrinkles, maintaining an accurate position and ensuring correct fiber orientation. Currently, this process is eitherdone fully manually or in simpler cases fully automatically through robots or application-specific handling devices. In this paper a system concept is proposed that allows human-robot collaborative draping. Based on typical use cases from the aerospace, boat-building and automotive industry variousinteraction modesare identified, including the joint transport of large patches of material, the placing of the material and the draping of areas of low and high curvature. The analysis is presented in the form of a prototypical robotic work-cell including the sensor systems as well as the real-time software architecture to allow a smooth and efficient interaction between the human and the robot.