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 requirement. 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 easily manipulate LEGO bricks. In addition, this paper uses evolution strategy to safely optimize the robot motion for LEGO manipulation. Experiments demonstrate that the EOAT performs reliably in manipulating 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：乐高是一个知名的像素化物体原型制作平台。然而，由于连接紧密且精度要求高，机器人乐高原型制作（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，特别地，通过硬件与软件的协同设计降低了操作的复杂度。设计了一种末端执行工具（EOAT），该工具降低了问题维度，使大型工业机器人能够轻松操作乐高积木。此外，本文使用进化策略来安全优化乐高操作的机器人运动。实验表明，EOAT在操作乐高积木时性能可靠，所提出的学习框架能够有效且安全地将操作性能提升至100%的成功率。该协同设计被部署到多种机器人（即FANUC LR-mate 200id/7L和Yaskawa GP4）上，以证明其通用性与可迁移性。最后，我们展示了所提出的解决方案能够实现可持续的机器人乐高原型制作，使机器人能够反复组装和拆卸不同的原型。