Abstract
There is no doubt that the rapid development in robotics technology has dramatically changed the interaction model between the Industrial Robot (IR) and the worker. As the current robotic technology has afforded very reliable means to guarantee the physical safety of the worker during a close proximity interaction with the IR. Therefore, new forms of cooperation between the robot and the worker can now be achieved. Collaborative/Cooperative robotics is the new branch of industrial robotics which empowers the idea of cooperative manufacturing. Cooperative manufacturing significantly depends on the existence of a collaborative/cooperative robot (cobot). A cobot is usually a Light-Weight Robot (LWR) which is capable of operating safely with the human co-worker in a shared work environment. This is in contrast with the conventional IR which can only operate in isolation from the worker workspace, due to the fact that the conventional IR can manipulate very heavy objects, which makes it so dangerous to operate in direct contact with the worker. There is a slight difference between the definition of collaboration and cooperation in robotics. In cooperative robotics, both the worker and the robot are performing tasks over the same product in the same shared workspace but not simultaneously. Collaborative robotics has a similar definition, except that the worker and the robot are performing a simultaneous task. Gathering the worker and the cobot in the same manufacturing workcell can provide an easy and cheap method to flexibly customize the production. Moreover, to adapt with the production demands in the real time of production, without the need to stop or to modify the production operations. There are many challenges and problems that can be addressed in the cooperative manufacturing field. However, one of the most important challenges in this field is the representation of the cooperative manufacturing environment and components. Thus, in order to accomplish the cooperative manufacturing concept, a proper approach is required to describe the shared environment between the worker and the cobot. The cooperative manufacturing shared environment includes the cobot, the co-worker, and other production components such as the product itself. Furthermore, the whole cooperative manufacturing system components need to communicate and share their knowledge, to reason and process the shared information, which eventually gives the control solution the capability of obtaining collective manufacturing decisions. Putting into consideration that the control solution should also provide a natural language which is human readable and in the same time can be understood by the machine (i.e., the cobot). Accordingly, a distributed control solution which combines an ontology-based Multi-Agent System (MAS) and a Business Rule Management System (BRMS) is proposed, in order to solve the mentioned challenges in the cooperative manufacturing, which are: manufacturing knowledge representation, sharing, and reasoning.
Highlights
Evolution of Industrial Roboticsthe concept of a mechanical creatures and beings can be seen in very old civilizations such as ancient Egypt, Greece, and China
The term robotics has been mentioned for the first time in 1941 by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov to emphasis the idea of a new generation of intelligent machines which can take control of their actions and act autonomously
The term robot comes from the word robota in the Slavic language, this term has been introduced for the first time in Czechoslovakia in 1920 by the writer Karel Capek in his fiction “Rossunis Universal Robot”
Summary
The concept of a mechanical creatures and beings can be seen in very old civilizations such as ancient Egypt, Greece, and China. An intense research focused on the safety in industrial robotics, which derived new control techniques such as impedance and admittance control that allowed a collision free cooperation between the IR and the worker This progress in safety techniques together with the advances in artificial intelligence technology led to the appearance of the third IR generation by the beginning of the current century. Manufacturing Knowledge Representation: in order to obtain the cooperation between a cobot and a human co-worker, all the knowledge in their shared environment including themselves should be represented in form of meta-data. In complex interaction scenario which requires to represent the relations between the cooperative workcell components and the actions that can be taken by every component, a new approach is needed beyond the simple String messaging. For that reason, during this article we only focus on the last three mentioned challenges which concern the cooperative manufacturing knowledge representation, sharing, and reasoning
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