Assembling wheels to continuously conveyed car bodies using a standard industrial robot

Within assembly lines, wheel assembly to continuously conveyed car bodies is still executed by human workers using a device that compensates the weight of the wheel. This paper presents a solution in which a robot autonomously assembles and fixes the wheels. The approach uses a sensor-driven control strategy that compensates a possible temporal or spatial offset. Three types of sensors are proposed for adequate perception of the wheel hub. Their signals are fused by a Kalman filter that allows predictions in the time domain. Finally, a feed-forward controller is used, that is designed to consider the predictions in order to minimize dynamical delays. The control is driven by a special task description that extents usual robot programming methods.