Towards a Tool-based Methodology for Developing Software for Dynamic Robot Teams

Considering initiatives like Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things, robots will play an important role in intelligent factories, producing highly customized products with high variability and in small lot sizes. In this setting, complexity of planning and programming such robotic applications grows due to the drastic increase in flexibility, performance and robustness required. In this paper, we propose a tool-supported methodology for the development of control software for dynamically forming multi-functional robot teams. The main challenges for achieving this overall goal are modeling of robot team skills, techniques for automatically deriving process steps from the products’ construction plans, finding allocations of those steps to possible robot teams with compatible skills and calculating collision-free execution schedules with a high degree of parallelization to improve cycle times. The proposed approach integrates process experts and automation experts on all level s. Two case studies will serve as test beds to the developed approach: production of carbon-fiber reinforced polymers and assembly of furniture.

[1]  Surya P. N. Singh,et al.  V-REP: A versatile and scalable robot simulation framework , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[2]  Xuerong Ji,et al.  Automatic Generation of High-Level Contact State Space , 2001, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[3]  Klas Nilsson,et al.  Knowledge-Based Reconfiguration of Automation Systems , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering.

[4]  Mac Schwager,et al.  Adaptive Coordinating Construction of Truss Structures Using Distributed Equal-Mass Partitioning , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[5]  Craig A. Knoblock,et al.  PDDL-the planning domain definition language , 1998 .

[6]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Planning with a task modeling framework in manufacturing robotics , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  John Hallam,et al.  An architecture for efficient reuse in flexible production scenarios , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).

[8]  Florian Krebs,et al.  Towards multi-functional robot-based automation systems , 2015, 2015 12th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO).

[9]  Jacek Malec,et al.  Knowledge-based instruction of manipulation tasks for industrial robotics , 2015 .

[10]  Andreas Angerer,et al.  A flexible architecture for automatically generating robot applications based on expert knowledge , 2016 .

[11]  B. Vogel-Heuser,et al.  Increasing agility in engineering and runtime of automated manufacturing systems , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology (ICIT).

[12]  Gunther Reinhart,et al.  Cyber-physical Robotics – Automated Analysis, Programming and Configuration of Robot Cells based on Cyber-physical-systems , 2014 .

[13]  Andrew Howard,et al.  Design and use paradigms for Gazebo, an open-source multi-robot simulator , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[14]  Andreas Angerer,et al.  A backward-oriented approach for offline programming of complex manufacturing tasks , 2015, 2015 6th International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications (ICARA).

[15]  Richard Fikes,et al.  STRIPS: A New Approach to the Application of Theorem Proving to Problem Solving , 1971, IJCAI.

[16]  Pedro Neto,et al.  High-level programming and control for industrial robotics: using a hand-held accelerometer-based input device for gesture and posture recognition , 2010, Ind. Robot.

[17]  Stephen F. Smith,et al.  Mobile manufacturing of large structures , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[18]  Yahui Gan,et al.  Off-Line Programming Techniques for Multirobot Cooperation System , 2013 .

[19]  Jürgen Beyerer,et al.  Plug & produce by modelling skills and service-oriented orchestration of reconfigurable manufacturing systems , 2015, Autom..

[20]  Berthold Bäuml,et al.  The Communication Layer of the aRDx Software Framework: Highly Performant and Realtime Deterministic , 2015, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[21]  Ross A. Knepper,et al.  IkeaBot: An autonomous multi-robot coordinated furniture assembly system , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[22]  Klas Nilsson,et al.  Knowledge for Intelligent Industrial Robots , 2012, AAAI Spring Symposium: Designing Intelligent Robots.

[23]  Leslie Pack Kaelbling,et al.  Foresight and reconsideration in hierarchical planning and execution , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[24]  Moshe Y. Vardi,et al.  Motion Planning with Complex Goals , 2011, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[25]  Joris De Schutter,et al.  Rapid application development of constrained-based task modelling and execution using domain specific languages , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[26]  Friedrich M. Wahl,et al.  The adaptive selection matrix—A key component for sensor-based control of robotic manipulators , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[27]  Leslie Pack Kaelbling,et al.  Hierarchical task and motion planning in the now , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[28]  Julie A. Shah,et al.  Fast Scheduling of Multi-Robot Teams with Temporospatial Constraints , 2013, Robotics: Science and Systems.

[29]  Andreas Angerer,et al.  Robotics API: object-oriented software development for industrial robots , 2013 .

[30]  Andrew Coles,et al.  Temporal Planning with Preferences and Time-Dependent Continuous Costs , 2012, ICAPS.

[31]  J. Norberto Pires.  Robotics for small and medium enterprises : control and programming challenges Author ( s ) : , 2006 .

[32]  Stephen L. Smith,et al.  A language for robot path planning in discrete environments: The TSP with Boolean satisfiability constraints , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[33]  Karsten Berns,et al.  On Software Quality-motivated Design of a Real-time Framework for Complex Robot Control Systems , 2013, Electron. Commun. Eur. Assoc. Softw. Sci. Technol..

[34]  Jürgen Beyerer,et al.  PPRS: Production skills and their relation to product, process, and resource , 2013, 2013 IEEE 18th Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA).