Abstract
Collaborative robots are today ever more interesting in response to the increasing need for agile manufacturing equipment. Contrary to traditional industrial robots, collaborative robots are intended for working in dynamic environments alongside the production staff. To cope with the dynamic environment and workflow, new configuration and control methods are needed compared to those of traditional industrial robots. The new methods should enable shop floor operators to reconfigure the robot. This article presents a plug and produce framework for industrial collaborative robots. The article focuses on the control framework enabling quick and easy exchange of hardware modules as an approach to achieving plug and produce. To solve this, an agent-based system is proposed building on top of the robot operating system. The framework enables robot operating system packages to be adapted into agents and thus supports the software sharing of the robot operating system community. A clear separation of the hardware agents and the higher level task control is achieved through standardization of the functional interface, a standardization maintaining the possibility of specialized function features. A feasibility study demonstrates the validity of the framework through a series of reconfigurations performed on a modular collaborative robot.
Highlights
In response to the challenges derived from the globalization, manufacturing companies today face the need for more flexible and agile manufacturing equipment
We have focused on intuitive robot programming and industrial applications for collaborative robots.[3,4]
We propose, design, and demonstrate a plug and produce framework for modular collaborative robots based on robot operating system (ROS).[6]
Summary
In response to the challenges derived from the globalization, manufacturing companies today face the need for more flexible and agile manufacturing equipment. The architecture covers automation equipment used for precision assembly in electronics manufacturing; this includes robots and robot modules.[21] Extending the results of EUPASS, the EU FP7 project “IDEAS”22 developed an integrated agent control board used as a proxy to adapt legacy components into agents.[23] The proposed framework and agent controller are tested through a series of industrial experiments which demonstrates the viability of the agent-based approach for shop floor reconfiguration of manufacturing systems in realworld settings.[23] In the EU FP7 project “PRIME,”[24] a multiagent system architecture was proposed which includes both standardized hardware and control interfaces as a means to developing highly adaptable and reconfigurable plug and produce systems. The device manager is the central node in the hardware management framework It connects the above task-level control system to the various device drivers. The following information must be available: 1..* Device hasPrimitive
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