Mobile Robots for Moving-Floor Assembly Lines: Design, Evaluation, and Deployment

Unhelkar, Vaibhav V.; Dörr, Stefan; Bubeck, Alexander; Lasota, Przemyslaw A.; Perez, Jorge; Siu, Ho Chit; Boerkoel, James C.; Tyroller, Quirin; Bix, Johannes; Bartscher, Stefan; Shah, Julie A.

doi:10.1109/mra.2018.2815639

Cited by 23 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Chen et al [ 20 ] developed a smart companion robot for the automotive assembly industry to assist human workers in lifting, transporting, and manipulating heavy payloads such as batteries and car body parts. Unhelkar et al [ 21 ] designed a mobile robot system capable of operating on the moving floors of automotive assembly lines. The purpose‐placed dynamic floors play an integral part in the robot's state estimation and path planning for task completion.…”

Section: Robotics In Industrial Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments

Sayed

Roberts

Donaldson

et al. 2022

Advanced Intelligent Systems

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Operations in extreme and hostile environments, such as offshore oil and gas production, nuclear decommissioning, nuclear facility maintenance, deep mining, space exploration, and subsea applications, require the execution of sophisticated tasks. In nuclear environments, robotic systems have advanced significantly over the past years but still suffer from task failures caused by informational and physical uncertainty of the highly unstructured nature of the environment and exasperated by the time constraints imposed by high radiation levels. Herein, a survey is presented of current robotic systems that can operate in such extreme environments and offer a novel approach to solving the challenges they impose, encapsulated by the mission statement of providing structure in unstructured environments and exemplified by a new self‐assembling modular robotic system, the Connect‐R.

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Section: Robotics In Industrial Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments

Sayed

Roberts

Donaldson

et al. 2022

Advanced Intelligent Systems

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“…The robots have advanced the automation degree, reduced the production cost, and balanced the product quality for the factories. However, during the rapid growth of robots, relevant techniques for robots in automobile factories are being faced with many challenges, e.g., lack of generality [6,29,32,34,39,40], large space demand [32,35,38], high cost for investing [30,33,34,37,41] and etc., which set limitations to the benefits of the manufacturing factory and optimization and upgrade of factories' production mode. Also, these problems could lead to the bankruptcy of automobile enterprises by causing a great impact on the capital chain during the factory optimization and upgrading phase, making classic brands vanish and staffs suffer unemployment.…”

Section: Traditional Manufacturing Factory For Automobilesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mobile Robot [29,30] Handling Robot [31] Palletizing Robot [32,33] Painting Robot [34,35] Welding Robot [36][37][38] Assembly robot [6,39] Inspection robot [40,41] Collaborative Robot [45][46][47][48] DH Robotics [26,56,57] "dynamic evolution", flexibly adapt to the changing working environment and functional requirement, and thus realize multiple functions by one machine [53][54][55].…”

Section: Typical Instancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconfigurability in Automobiles—Structure, Manufacturing and Algorithm for Automobiles

Zhuang¹,

Guan²,

Xu³

et al. 2022

IJAMM

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Review Reconfigurability in Automobiles—Structure, Manufacturing and Algorithm for Automobiles Zheming Zhuang 1, Yuntao Guan 1, Shuangjia Xu 2,4, and Jian S. Dai 3,4, * 1 Key Laboratory of Mechanism Theory and Equipment Design of the Ministry of Education, Centre for Advanced Mechanisms and Robotics, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China zhuangzheming@tju.edu.cn (Z.Z.); guanyuntao_018@tju.edu.cn (Y.G.) 2 DH Robotics Ltd, Shenzhen, China; Shuangjia.xu@dh-robotics.com 3 Institute for Robotics, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China 4 Centre for Robotics Research, King’s College London, London, UK * Correspondence: jian.dai@kcl.ac.uk Received: 9 November 2022 Accepted: 10 November 2022 Published: 18 December 2022 Abstract: For the automobile design and manufacturing, as a typical representative of the industry, the development and upgrading represent the application of the state-of-the-art technology in the industry. With a period of development, the related technology of traditional manufacturing factories for automobiles are found with some common issues while improving. As such, the reconfigurable intelligent manufacturing factory of the automobiles is fast developed with focus on reconfigurability in structures, manufactures and algorithms, thus advancing the level of the reconfigurable intelligent manufacturing continuously. With a sufficient reconfigurable manufacturing technology as the basis, reconfigurability can be better introduced to the structure design and the driving algorithms of the automobiles. Reconfigurability provides a new bridge for transforming the traditional automobile to the reconfigurable automobile, and a new driving force for the upgrading of the reconfigurable driving algorithms.

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“…As the robots are battery powered and they are supposed to be operational all the time, there needs to be some mechanism in place to recharge the batteries of the robots whenever required. Such a situation also arises when multiple robots are employed for delivering some objects following their preplanned trajectories in an assembly line [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobile Recharger Path Planning and Recharge Scheduling in a Multi-Robot Environment

Kundu¹,

Saha²

2021

Preprint

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In many multi-robot applications, mobile worker robots are often engaged in performing some tasks repetitively by following pre-computed trajectories. As these robots are battery-powered, they need to get recharged at regular intervals. We envision that in the future, a few mobile recharger robots will be employed to supply charge to the energy-deficient worker robots recurrently, to keep the overall efficiency of the system optimized. In this setup, we need to find the time instants and locations for the meeting of the worker robots and recharger robots optimally. We present a Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT)-based approach that captures the activities of the robots in the form of constraints in a sufficiently long finitelength time window (hypercycle) whose repetitions provide their perpetual behavior. Our SMT encoding ensures that for a chosen length of the hypercycle, the total waiting time of the worker robots due to charge constraints is minimized under certain condition, and close to optimal when the condition does not hold. Moreover, the recharger robots follow the most energy-efficient trajectories. We show the efficacy of our approach by comparing it with another variant of the SMTbased method which is not scalable but provides an optimal solution globally, and with a greedy algorithm.

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Mobile Robots for Moving-Floor Assembly Lines: Design, Evaluation, and Deployment

Cited by 23 publications

References 17 publications

Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments

Modular Robots for Enabling Operations in Unstructured Extreme Environments

Reconfigurability in Automobiles—Structure, Manufacturing and Algorithm for Automobiles

Mobile Recharger Path Planning and Recharge Scheduling in a Multi-Robot Environment

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