Abstract
The design and operation of manufacturing systems is evolving to adapt to different challenges. One of the most important is the reconfiguration of the manufacturing process in response to context changes (e.g., faulty equipment or urgent orders, among others). In this sense, the Autonomous Transport Vehicle (ATV) plays a key role in building more flexible and decentralized manufacturing systems. Nowadays, robotic frameworks (RFs) are used for developing robotic systems such as ATVs, but they focus on the control of the robotic system itself. However, social abilities are required for performing intelligent interaction (peer-to-peer negotiation and decision-making) among the different and heterogeneous Cyber Physical Production Systems (such as machines, transport systems and other equipment present in the factory) to achieve manufacturing reconfiguration. This work contributes a generic multi-layer architecture that integrates a RF with a Multi-Agent System (MAS) to provide social abilities to ATVs. This architecture has been implemented on ROS and JADE, the most widespread RF and MAS framework, respectively. We believe this to be the first work that addresses the intelligent interaction of transportation systems for flexible manufacturing environments in a holistic form.
Highlights
Different international roadmaps [1,2,3] for the digitalization of manufacturing systems deal with the need of new networked technologies that help factories adapt to current market demands, namely: on-demand production, shorter lifecycles, mass-customization schemes, high quality standards, rising speed of delivery and yet lower fixed costs
From MR1 and MR2, we identify a list of more specific requirements (SR) related to the Autonomous Transport Vehicle (ATV) and its socialization abilities (Table 1)
The core set of specific multi-layered architecture proposal that integrates a robotic frameworks (RFs), responsible for the control of the main robotic requirements related to the socialization of ATVs have been identified
Summary
Different international roadmaps [1,2,3] for the digitalization of manufacturing systems deal with the need of new networked technologies that help factories adapt to current market demands, namely: on-demand production, shorter lifecycles, mass-customization schemes, high quality standards, rising speed of delivery and yet lower fixed costs. Research on autonomous transportation has been mainly focused on the design of robust software algorithms, libraries and tools, and on the integration of heterogeneous hardware components [6] These works should be complemented in order to add social abilities to achieve efficient transportation tasks in changing environments. The application of the MAS paradigm to RFs contributes to the agentification of an ATV, a process by which an ATV would become an agent that can socialize with other agents in the factory In this context, this work contributes to the definition of a generic multi-layer architecture for enabling the MARS social abilities in ATVs and, fulfilling MR1 and MR2. This work contributes to the definition of a generic multi-layer architecture for enabling the MARS social abilities in ATVs and, fulfilling MR1 and MR2 It integrates ROS and JADE, both open-source and widely spread RF and MAS framework, respectively. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 summarizes the related work; Section 3 describes the ROS-JADE integration architecture; in Section 4, three uses cases are presented to demonstrate how the architecture can accomplish significant goals in some meaningful scenarios; Section 5 collects the conclusions of the work
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