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：乐高是原型化像素化对象的著名平台。然而，由于连接紧密和精度要求高，机器人乐高原型制作（即操作乐高积木）极具挑战性。本文研究了安全且高效的机器人乐高操作。具体而言，本文通过硬件-软件协同设计降低了操作复杂度。设计了一种末端工具（EOAT），它降低了问题维度，使大型工业机器人能够轻松操作乐高积木。此外，本文使用进化策略安全地优化机器人乐高操作的运动。实验表明，EOAT在操作乐高积木时表现可靠，且该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。该协同设计已部署到多个机器人（如FANUC LR-mate 200id/7L和Yaskawa GP4）上，以证明其泛化性和可迁移性。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制作，其中机器人可以重复组装和拆卸不同的原型。