Enabling Flexibility in Manufacturing by Integrating Shopfloor and Process Perception for Mobile Robot Workers

Abstract

Robotic flexibility in industry is becoming more and more relevant nowadays, especially with the rise of the Industry 4.0 concept. This paper presents a smart execution control framework for enabling the autonomous operation of flexible mobile robot workers. These robot resources are able to autonomously navigate the shopfloor, undertaking multiple operations while acting as assistants to human operators. To enable this autonomous behavior, the proposed framework integrates robot perception functions for the real-time shopfloor and process understanding while orchestrating the process execution. A Digital World Model is deployed synthesizing the sensor data coming from multiple 2D and 3D sensors from the shopfloor. This model is consumed for the perception functions enabling the real-time shopfloor and process perception by the robot workers. This smart control system has been applied and validated in a case study from the automotive sector.

Keywords

• digital twin
• shopfloor perception
• process perception
• mobile robots
• reconfiguration