Conventional industrial robots often use two-fingered grippers or suction cups to manipulate objects or interact with the world. Because of their simplified design, they are unable to reproduce the dexterity of human hands when manipulating a wide range of objects. While the control of humanoid hands evolved greatly, hardware platforms still lack capabilities, particularly in tactile sensing and providing soft contact surfaces. In this work, we present a method that equips the skeleton of a tendon-driven humanoid hand with a soft and sensorized tactile skin. Multi-material 3D printing allows us to iteratively approach a cast skin design which preserves the robot's dexterity in terms of range of motion and speed. We demonstrate that a soft skin enables firmer grasps and piezoresistive sensor integration enhances the hand's tactile sensing capabilities.

The University of Maine just unveiled the world's largest polymer 3D printer. The new printer, named Factory of the Future 1.0 (FoF 1.0), can print objects as large as 96 feet long by 32 feet wide by 18 feet high. It's also quite speedy, relatively speaking, as it can print up to 500 pounds per hour. It can dynamically switch between printing techniques to suit different aspects of complex jobs. The printer can flip between large-scale additive manufacturing, subtractive manufacturing, continuous tape layup and robot arm operations.

Keeping the balance between electricity generation and consumption is becoming increasingly challenging and costly, mainly due to the rising share of renewables, electric vehicles and heat pumps and electrification of industrial processes. Accurate imbalance forecasts, along with reliable uncertainty estimations, enable transmission system operators (TSOs) to dispatch appropriate reserve volumes, reducing balancing costs. Further, market parties can use these probabilistic forecasts to design strategies that exploit asset flexibility to help balance the grid, generating revenue with known risks. Despite its importance, literature regarding system imbalance (SI) forecasting is limited. Further, existing methods do not focus on situations with high imbalance magnitude, which are crucial to forecast accurately for both TSOs and market parties. Hence, we propose an ensemble of C-VSNs, which are our adaptation of variable selection networks (VSNs). Each minute, our model predicts the imbalance of the current and upcoming two quarter-hours, along with uncertainty estimations on these forecasts. We evaluate our approach by forecasting the imbalance of Belgium, where high imbalance magnitude is defined as $|$SI$| > 500\,$MW (occurs 1.3% of the time in Belgium). For high imbalance magnitude situations, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by 23.4% (in terms of continuous ranked probability score (CRPS), which evaluates probabilistic forecasts), while also attaining a 6.5% improvement in overall CRPS. Similar improvements are achieved in terms of root-mean-squared error. Additionally, we developed a fine-tuning methodology to effectively include new inputs with limited history in our model. This work was performed in collaboration with Elia (the Belgian TSO) to further improve their imbalance forecasts, demonstrating the relevance of our work.

Recent technological innovations in the areas of additive manufacturing and collaborative robotics have paved the way toward realizing the concept of on-demand, personalized production on the shop floor. Additive manufacturing process can provide the capability of printing highly customized parts based on various customer requirements. Autonomous, mobile systems provide the flexibility to move custom parts around the shop floor to various manufacturing operations, as needed by product requirements. In this work, we proposed a mobile additive manufacturing robot framework for merging an additive manufacturing process system with an autonomous mobile base. Two case studies showcase the potential benefits of the proposed mobile additive manufacturing framework. The first case study overviews the effect that a mobile system can have on a fused deposition modeling process. The second case study showcases how integrating a mobile additive manufacturing machine can improve the throughput of the manufacturing system. The major findings of this study are that the proposed mobile robotic AM has increased throughput by taking advantage of the travel time between operations/processing sites. It is particularly suited to perform intermittent operations (e.g., preparing feedstock) during the travel time of the robotic AM. One major implication of this study is its application in manufacturing structural components (e.g., concrete construction, and feedstock preparation during reconnaissance missions) in remote or extreme terrains with on-site or on-demand feedstocks.

With the advancements in 3D printing technologies, it is extremely important that the quality of 3D printed objects, and dimensional accuracies should meet the customer's specifications. Various factors during metal printing affect the printed parts' quality, including the power quality, the printing stage parameters, the print part's location inside the print bed, the curing stage parameters, and the metal sintering process. With the large data gathered from HP's MetJet printing process, AI techniques can be used to analyze, learn, and effectively infer the printed part quality metrics, as well as assist in improving the print yield. In-situ thermal sensing data captured by printer-installed thermal sensors contains the part thermal signature of fusing layers. Such part thermal signature contains a convoluted impact from various factors. In this paper, we use a multimodal thermal encoder network to fuse data of a different nature including the video data vectorized printer control data, and exact part thermal signatures with a trained encoder-decoder module. We explored the data fusing techniques and stages for data fusing, the optimized end-to-end model architecture indicates an improved part quality prediction accuracy.

Metal Sintering is a necessary step for Metal Injection Molded parts and binder jet such as HP's metal 3D printer. The metal sintering process introduces large deformation varying from 25 to 50% depending on the green part porosity. In this paper, we use a graph-based deep learning approach to predict the part deformation, which can speed up the deformation simulation substantially at the voxel level. Running a well-trained Metal Sintering inferencing engine only takes a range of seconds to obtain the final sintering deformation value. The tested accuracy on example complex geometry achieves 0.7um mean deviation for a 63mm testing part.

Origami designs and structures have been widely used in many fields, such as morphing structures, robotics, and metamaterials. However, the design and fabrication of origami structures rely on human experiences and skills, which are both time and labor-consuming. In this paper, we present a rapid design and fabrication method for string-driven origami structures and robots. We developed an origami design software to generate desired crease patterns based on analytical models and Evolution Strategies (ES). Additionally, the software can automatically produce 3D models of origami designs. We then used a dual-material 3D printer to fabricate those wrapping-based origami structures with the required mechanical properties. We utilized Twisted String Actuators (TSAs) to fold the target 3D structures from flat plates. To demonstrate the capability of these techniques, we built and tested an origami crawling robot and an origami robotic arm using 3D-printed origami structures driven by TSAs.

Industrial robotic applications such as spraying, welding, and additive manufacturing frequently require fast, accurate, and uniform motion along a 3D spatial curve. To increase process throughput, some manufacturers propose a dual-robot setup to overcome the speed limitation of a single robot. Industrial robot motion is programmed through waypoints connected by motion primitives (Cartesian linear and circular paths and linear joint paths at constant Cartesian speed). The actual robot motion is affected by the blending between these motion primitives and the pose of the robot (an outstretched/close to singularity pose tends to have larger path-tracking errors). Choosing the waypoints and the speed along each motion segment to achieve the performance requirement is challenging. At present, there is no automated solution, and laborious manual tuning by robot experts is needed to approach the desired performance. In this paper, we present a systematic three-step approach to designing and programming a dual-robot system to optimize system performance. The first step is to select the relative placement between the two robots based on the specified relative motion path. The second step is to select the relative waypoints and the motion primitives. The final step is to update the waypoints iteratively based on the actual relative motion. Waypoint iteration is first executed in simulation and then completed using the actual robots. For performance measures, we use the mean path speed subject to the relative position and orientation constraints and the path speed uniformity constraint. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of this method with ABB and FANUC robots on two challenging test curves. The performance improvement over the current industrial practice baseline is over 300%. Compared to the optimized single-arm case that we have previously reported, the improvement is over 14%.

For autonomous crane lifting, optimal trajectories of the crane are required as reference inputs to the crane controller to facilitate feedforward control. Reducing the unactuated payload motion is a crucial issue for under-actuated tower cranes with spherical pendulum dynamics. The planned trajectory should be optimal in terms of both operating time and energy consumption, to facilitate optimum output spending optimum effort. This article proposes an anti-swing tower crane trajectory planner that can provide time-energy optimal solutions for the Computer-Aided Lift Planning (CALP) system developed at Nanyang Technological University, which facilitates collision-free lifting path planning of robotized tower cranes in autonomous construction sites. The current work introduces a trajectory planning module to the system that utilizes the geometric outputs from the path planning module and optimally scales them with time information. Firstly, analyzing the non-linear dynamics of the crane operations, the tower crane is established as differentially flat. Subsequently, the multi-objective trajectory optimization problems for all the crane operations are formulated in the flat output space through consideration of the mechanical and safety constraints. Two multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, namely Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) and Generalized Differential Evolution 3 (GDE3), are extensively compared via statistical measures based on the closeness of solutions to the Pareto front, distribution of solutions in the solution space and the runtime, to select the optimization engine of the planner. Finally, the crane operation trajectories are obtained via the corresponding planned flat output trajectories. Studies simulating real-world lifting scenarios are conducted to verify the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed module of the lift planning system.

Deep learning based transient stability assessment (TSA) has achieved great success, yet the lack of interpretability hinders its industrial application. Although a great number of studies have tried to explore the interpretability of network solutions, many problems still remain unsolved: (1) the difference between the widely accepted power system knowledge and the generated interpretive rules is large, (2) the probability characteristics of the neural network have not been fully considered during generating the interpretive rules, (3) the cost of the trade-off between accuracy and interpretability is too heavy to take. To address these issues, an interpretable power system Transient Stability Assessment method with Expert guiding Neural-Regression-Tree (TSA-ENRT) is proposed. TSA-ENRT utilizes an expert guiding nonlinear regression tree to approximate the neural network prediction and the neural network can be explained by the interpretive rules generated by the tree model. The nonlinearity of the expert guiding nonlinear regression tree is endowed with the extracted knowledge from a simple two-machine three-bus power system, which forms an expert knowledge base and thus the generated interpretive rules are more consistent with human cognition. Besides, the expert guiding tree model can build a bridge between the interpretive rules and the probability prediction of neural network in a regression way. By regularizing the neural network with the average decision length of ENRT, the association of the neural network and tree model is constructed in the model training level which provides a better trade-off between accuracy and interpretability. Extensive experiments indicate the interpretive rules generated by the proposed TSA-ENRT are highly consistent with the neural network prediction and more agreed with human expert cognition.