Flexible and reconfigurable robotic inspection in manufacturing

Having a generic and flexible software infrastructure for inspection robots is the main goal of the SPIRIT project. SPIRIT is a EU funded project whose main tangible result is a software framework that includes an offline and an inline framework. The offline part is used for simulating the robotic workcell and configure the whole inspection task, e.g. select the robot and the inspection sensor and finally compute robot trajectory. The inline part instead is responsible for reproducing the simulated task on the real robot, it also includes innovative features like local and global re-planning, real-time data mapping for backprojecting sensor information on the 3D CAD model of the inspected part. In the project four different demonstrators have been developed, they all belongs to different industrial settings, i.e. automotive, aerospace and manufacture industry. Such high level of diversity demonstrates how the SPIRIT framework is general and flexible enough to be used in heterogeneous environments without prototyping and developing the entire workcell from scratch each time.