Future robotic assembly systems will allow product designers to upload their assembled product models remotely such that they can be assembled autonomously. In this work we present the architecture for a Click and Assemble Robotic Assembly (CARA) system. This architecture takes an assembly file uploaded by the user through a web interface as the only input. It then performs all the necessary planning before executing the assembly. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that all of the required components from previous advances in robotic assembly have been brought together, with all interconnecting challenges solved, into a complete working system for physical, real world assembly tasks. To demonstrate the implemented architecture capabilities, a real industrial product with tight tolerances was assembled from its CAD file only, illustrating the end to end robotic assembly premise in a real world setting.

In this paper, the use of a monitoring companion is proposed to more efficiently collect the process information during the tuning of industrial systems, and therefore to assist the system integrator in the optimization process for complex robotic installations. The monitoring companion consists of an industrial manipulator (monitoring robot) and a Unity-ROS framework for controlling it. We discuss in this paper the features that allow the solution to be re-used in different industrial application thanks to its compatibility with ROS. In particular, we present the approach based on admittance virtual fixtures and how we use such abstraction to track a moving target (it could be the end-effector of another robot for example). Moreover, the concept of varying compliance is introduced as a way to influence the motion of the monitoring robot on the virtual fixtures in the presence of obstacles. The experiments have been conducted in simulation as well as on real hardware to test the accuracy of the system at respecting the virtual fixtures with both a static and a moving monitoring target, although in the current implementation the varying compliance was not included in the experiments.

The recent progress made in the field of Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality (AR/MR) has opened new possibilities and approaches to research areas that can benefit from 3D visualization of digital content in the real world. In fact, human-robot interaction design and the design of user interfaces have very much to gain from MR technologies. Nonetheless, designing the user-robot interaction and processing multimodal feedbacks are very challenging tasks. In this paper we focus in particular on interactions in mixed reality.