Autonomous Production Systems Using Open Architectures and Mobile Robotic Structures

Abstract

This paper investigates the flexibility aspects of production systems that use highly interactive and autonomous mobile robotic units. Open communication architectures and ontology technologies enable the accurate representation of robot capabilities. Mobile robots can relocate themselves and support the production process, thus providing a higher reconfiguration potential. Services are used for real time transactions between stationary and mobile robots towards the implementation of a process plan. The units can cooperate and determine their course of actions. This approach was applied to an experimental cell, where the system managed to implement production plans for the packaging of small sized products without human intervention.

Decision making logic for flexible assembly lines reconfiguration

“…At this point, the execution of the control logic with respect to the workload generation was partially manual (creation of additional task templates from Section 4.1) and partially automated (assignment of tasks to resources by the software toolintelligent algorithm) based on the model and the algorithm presented in Section 4. The main reasons for this selection are the following [13,55]:…”

The Internet of Robotic Things

“…Kousi et al 82 developed a service-oriented architecture to support autonomous, mobile production units which can fuse data from a peripheral sensing network to detect disturbances. Michalos et al 83 developed a distributed system for data sharing and coordination of human-robot collaborative operations, connected to a centralized task planner. Production lines have also been framed as multi-agent systems 84,85 equipped with self-descriptive capabilities to reduce set-up and changeover times.…”

Distributed monitoring of heterogeneous robotic cells. A proposal for the footwear industry 4.0

“…Other authors rely on eXtensive Markup Language, commonly known as XML, to encode the transmitted data from monitored machinery (Mantha, Menassa, & Kamat, 2018). This standard works well in cases where data transmission is carried out sporadically and when messages need meta-data (Michalos et al, 2015). The verbosity of XML becomes a problem when data needs to be fetched at high rate and in real-time and also if this data needs to be stored for later use.…”