Teach industrial robots peg-hole-insertion by human demonstration

Programming robotic assembly tasks usually requires delicate force tuning. In contrast, human may accomplish assembly tasks with much less time and fewer trials. It will be a great benefit if robots can learn the human inherent skill of force control and apply it autonomously. Recent works on Learning from Demonstration (LfD) have shown the possibility to teach robots by human demonstration. The basic idea is to collect the force and corrective velocity that human applies during assembly, and then use them to regress a proper gain for the robot admittance controller. However, many of the LfD methods are tested on collaborative robots with compliant joints and relatively large assembly clearance. For industrial robots, the non-backdrivable mechanism and strict tolerance requirement make the assembly tasks more challenging. This paper modifies the original LfD to be suitable for industrial robots. A new demonstration tool is designed to acquire the human demonstration data. The force control gains are learned by Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR) and the closed-loop stability is analysed. A series of peg-hole-insertion experiments with H7h7 tolerance on a FANUC manipulator validate the performance of the proposed learning method.