Dismantling interior facilities in buildings by human robot collaboration

New robotic systems will be playing an essential role in the future dismantling service for renewing office interiors facilities in buildings. In our study, the dismantling task would be achieved by proper collaboration between human workers and robots utilizing mobile arms, interface devices and software. This paper describes an overview of the proposed dismantling system as well as its requirements. The real experiments presented are focused on the disassembling task of a ceiling lamp panel (LP). In the disassembling task, a robot arm collaborates with the human worker holding the LP, accomplishing an assisting function. At first, in order to approach the robot to the holding position, the worker controls the robot using interface devices which are also evaluated in their usability aspect. Then, a laser pointer fixed at the robot's tip is used both as a guidance in the teleoperation process and as a first indicator of the holding position. As a second step toward the target, the control program applies model-based 3D object recognition techniques to calculate the final position. At this stage the information of an stereo camera, configured as an eye-in-hand system, is necessary. On the last part of the task, the robot reaches the estimated position automatically by using the results of its kinematic analysis. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.