This paper investigates the direct application of standardized designs on the robot for conducting robot hand-eye calibration by employing 3D scanners with collaborative robots. The well-established geometric features of the robot flange are exploited by directly capturing its point cloud data. In particular, an iterative method is proposed to facilitate point cloud processing toward a refined calibration outcome. Several extensive experiments are conducted over a range of collaborative robots, including Universal Robots UR5 & UR10 e-series, Franka Emika, and AUBO i5 using an industrial-grade 3D scanner Photoneo Phoxi S & M and a commercial-grade 3D scanner Microsoft Azure Kinect DK. Experimental results show that translational and rotational errors converge efficiently to less than 0.28 mm and 0.25 degrees, respectively, achieving a hand-eye calibration accuracy as high as the camera's resolution, probing the hardware limit. A welding seam tracking system is presented, combining the flange-based calibration method with soft tactile sensing. The experiment results show that the system enables the robot to adjust its motion in real-time, ensuring consistent weld quality and paving the way for more efficient and adaptable manufacturing processes.

Ultrasound scanning robots enable the automatic imaging of a patient's internal organs by maintaining close contact between the ultrasound probe and the patient's body during a scanning procedure. Comprehensive, high-quality ultrasound scans are essential for providing the patient with an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment plan. An ultrasound scanning robot usually works in a doctor-robot co-existing environment, hence both efficiency and safety during the collaboration should be considered. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal control scheme for ultrasound scanning robots, in which three interaction modes are integrated into a single control input. Specifically, the scanning mode drives the robot to track a time-varying trajectory on the patient's body under the desired impedance model; the recovery mode allows the robot to actively recontact the body whenever physical contact between the ultrasound probe and the patient's body is lost; the human-guided mode renders the robot passive such that the doctor can safely intervene to manually reposition the probe. The integration of multiple modes allows the doctor to intervene safely at any time during the task and also maximizes the robot's autonomous scanning ability. The performance of the robot is validated on a collaborative scanning task of a carotid artery examination.

The ability to learn from human demonstration endows robots with the ability to automate various tasks. However, directly learning from human demonstration is challenging since the structure of the human hand can be very different from the desired robot gripper. In this work, we show that manipulation skills can be transferred from a human to a robot through the use of micro-evolutionary reinforcement learning, where a five-finger human dexterous hand robot gradually evolves into a commercial robot, while repeated interacting in a physics simulator to continuously update the policy that is first learned from human demonstration. To deal with the high dimensions of robot parameters, we propose an algorithm for multi-dimensional evolution path searching that allows joint optimization of both the robot evolution path and the policy. Through experiments on human object manipulation datasets, we show that our framework can efficiently transfer the expert human agent policy trained from human demonstrations in diverse modalities to target commercial robots.

There is invariably a trade-off between safety and efficiency for collaborative robots (cobots) in human-robot collaborations. Robots that interact minimally with humans can work with high speed and accuracy but cannot adapt to new tasks or respond to unforeseen changes, whereas robots that work closely with humans can but only by becoming passive to humans, meaning that their main tasks suspended and efficiency compromised. Accordingly, this paper proposes a new complementary framework for human-robot collaboration that balances the safety of humans and the efficiency of robots. In this framework, the robot carries out given tasks using a vision-based adaptive controller, and the human expert collaborates with the robot in the null space. Such a decoupling drives the robot to deal with existing issues in task space (e.g., uncalibrated camera, limited field of view) and in null space (e.g., joint limits) by itself while allowing the expert to adjust the configuration of the robot body to respond to unforeseen changes (e.g., sudden invasion, change of environment) without affecting the robot's main task. Additionally, the robot can simultaneously learn the expert's demonstration in task space and null space beforehand with dynamic movement primitives (DMP). Therefore, an expert's knowledge and a robot's capability are both explored and complementary. Human demonstration and involvement are enabled via a mixed interaction interface, i.e., augmented reality (AR) and haptic devices. The stability of the closed-loop system is rigorously proved with Lyapunov methods. Experimental results in various scenarios are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.