Simulating robot handling of large scale deformable objects: Manufacturing of unique concrete reinforcement structures

Automatic offline programming of industrial robotic systems is becoming increasingly important due to the larger percentage of desired automation of low volume tasks. Often, such tasks may involve handling of items that can have rather large deflections which are important to take into account when doing offline programming. In this paper such a problem is presented, namely robotic assembly of unique concrete reinforcement structures. Reinforcement bars of 3 meters may deflect up to around 50cm. We illustrate experimentally how the reinforcement bar can be precisely modelled by a structure consisting of rigid parts connected by “deflection joints”. Such a model can be directly integrated into existing physics simulation engines such as the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE). Finally, we discuss how the simulation will be used for automatic offline programming and present a video with a dynamic simulation of the reinforcement assembly process.