Lego is a well-known platform for prototyping pixelized objects. However, robotic Lego prototyping (i.e., manipulating Lego bricks) is challenging due to the tight connections and accuracy requirements. This paper investigates safe and efficient robotic Lego manipulation. In particular, this paper reduces the complexity of the manipulation by hardware-software co-design. An end-of-arm tool (EOAT) is designed, which reduces the problem dimension and allows large industrial robots to manipulate small Lego bricks. In addition, this paper uses evolution strategy to optimize the robot motion for Lego manipulation. Experiments demonstrate that the EOAT can reliably manipulate Lego bricks and the learning framework can effectively and safely improve the manipulation performance to a 100% success rate. The co-design is deployed to multiple robots (i.e., FANUC LR-mate 200id/7L and Yaskawa GP4) to demonstrate its generalizability and transferability. In the end, we show that the proposed solution enables sustainable robotic Lego prototyping, in which the robot can repeatedly assemble and disassemble different prototypes.

翻译：乐高是一种用于原型化像素化物体的知名平台。然而，由于连接紧密且精度要求高，机器人乐高原型化（即操作乐高积木）具有挑战性。本文研究了安全高效的机器人乐高操作。具体而言，本文通过软硬件协同设计降低了操作复杂性。设计了一种末端执行工具（EOAT），它降低了问题维度，使得大型工业机器人能够操作小型乐高积木。此外，本文采用进化策略优化乐高操作中的机器人运动。实验表明，所设计的EOAT能够可靠地操作乐高积木，且学习框架能够有效且安全地将操作性能提升至100%成功率。该协同设计被部署到多种机器人（即FANUC LR-mate 200id/7L和Yaskawa GP4）上，以证明其通用性和可迁移性。最后，我们展示了所提出的方案能够实现可持续的机器人乐高原型化，即机器人可以重复组装和拆卸不同的原型。