DrapeBot

The H2020 research project DrapeBot aims at the development of a human-robot collaborative draping process for carbon fiber composite parts. The robot will drape the large, less curved areas, while the human will drape the areas of high curvature that are difficult to reach. The transfer of large patches of fabric, which can be several meters long, is done jointly by the robot and the human.

The project will put specific emphasis on the efficiency of the collaboration, so that a real increase over human-only and robot-only draping processes is achieved. For this purpose vision sensors as well as force and torque sensors will provide input to a real-time feedback control loop that adjusts the robot’s motions.

To ensure that the draping results are of good quality a specific modular and flexible gripper will be designed. The gripper includes sensors for measuring the position of the patches and for determining fiber orientation during the draping process. The development of the gripper will also include requirements coming from the human-robot collaboration aspects of the project.

To ensure usability of the draping robot in real-world applications, experimental studies will be done to assess usability and trust. These results will be fed back to the design to make sure that the human-robot collaboration also works at the non-technical level.