Conference Paper

RoboGrind: Intuitive and Interactive Surface Treatment with Industrial Robots

We presented our paper “RoboGrind: Intuitive and Interactive Surface Treatment with Industrial Robots” at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Yokohama, Japan. The paper proposes an interactive AI-powered assistant for robotic surface treatment that combines advanced computer vision, path planning, reasoninh and natural-language interaction. We demonstrate our assistant in the context of remanufacturing wind turbine blades.

The full text of the paper is accessible on ArXiv (Link).

Surface treatment tasks such as grinding, sanding or polishing are a vital step of the value chain in many industries, but are notoriously challenging to automate. We present RoboGrind, an integrated system for the intuitive, interactive automation of surface treatment tasks with industrial robots. It combines a sophisticated 3D perception pipeline for surface scanning and automatic defect identification, an interactive voice-controlled wizard system for the AI-assisted bootstrapping and parameterization of robot programs, and an automatic planning and execution pipeline for force-controlled robotic surface treatment. RoboGrind is evaluated both under laboratory and real-world conditions in the context of refabricating fiberglass wind turbine blades.

RoboGrind is an intuitive, interactive system for robotic surface treatment comprising perception, program generation, planning and control.