Increased customer needs and intensified global competition require intelligent and flexible automation. The interaction technology mobile robotics 1 addresses this, so it holds great potential within the industry.This paper presents the concepts, ideas and working principles of the mobile robot "Little Helper" 2 -an ongoing research project at Aalborg University, Denmark, concerning the development of an autonomous and flexible manufacturing assistant.To demonstrate the "Little Helper" concept a fullscale prototype has been built and experiments carried out. Experiences and knowledge gained from this show promising results regarding industrial integration, exploitation and maturation of mobile robotics.

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This paper investigates the application potential for the technology-push manufacturing technology (TPMT) autonomous industrial mobile manipulation (AIMM), in order to link the conceptual ideas (academia) to actual manufacturing requirements (industry). The approach is based on the proposed TPMT methodology in a comprehensive industrial case study. More than 566 manufacturing tasks have been analyzed according to three main application areas (logistics, assistance, and service) to find their suitability for the AIMM technology. The conducted TPMT analysis shows that AIMM has great potential within the manufacturing industries. More than two thirds of the analyzed manufacturing tasks are solvable with AIMM within the next few years. The AIMM technology, at its current stage, finds most suitable applications within logistics (e.g., transportation and part feeding), moving toward assistance (e.g., (pre)assembly and machine tending), and in the future more service-minded tasks (e.g., maintenance and cleaning). Based on the identified realworld applications, it is possible to raise the AIMM technology to the next levels of industrial maturation, integration, and commercialization.