Collaborative Robots
Compared to traditional industrial robots, collaborative robotic manipulators, also known as cobots, are ideal to work with human. The term collaborative means collaboration between human the robot. Our lab has a six degree-of-freedom cobot manipulator. The cobot comes with versatile programmability. Students have been using MATLAB, Python, and C++ to program the robot.
Ongoing topics
Currently there are two robots in the lab – CR3 and Sawyer. The team use them as a platform to conduct various studies:
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- Path Panning – Develop forward and inverse kinematics algorithms for complex trajectories.
- Sensor Integration – Sensory is the key factor to have the robot being “smart”.
- Human-Robot Collaboration – Instead of enclosed behind a safety fence, we want to robot to sit directly beside a person, and work together for various tasks.
- Software Development – We are working closely with partners from industry to develop custom software packages.
Inter-disciplinary Collaboration
Modern robotics requires immense software development. Dr. Wu works with students from different background. Vaughan Hood (’24) is a Computer Science major student, and he is one the 4 poster award winners for the 2024 COEIT research day.
The development digital twin requires the collaboration between professional software developers and roboticists. All the 3 figures below shows the same pose of the robot. Left: the model built in MATLAB; center: the real robot (physical twin); right: the digital twin.
