Abstract
The current industrial scenario demands advances that depend on expensive and sophisticated solutions. Augmented Reality (AR) can complement, with virtual elements, the real world. Faced with this features, an AR experience can meet the demand for prototype testing and new solutions, predicting problems and failures that may only exist in real situations. This work presents an environment for experimentation of advanced behaviors in smart factories, allowing experimentation with multi-robot systems (MRS), interconnected, cooperative, and interacting with virtual elements. The concept of ARENA introduces a novel approach to realistic and immersive experimentation in industrial environments, aiming to evaluate new technologies aligned with the Industry 4.0. The proposed method consists of a small-scale warehouse, inspired in a real scenario characterized in this paper, managing by a group of autonomous forklifts, fully interconnected, which are embodied by a swarm of tiny robots developed and prepared to operate in the small scale scenario. The AR is employed to enhance the capabilities of swarm robots, allowing box handling and virtual forklifts. Virtual laser range finders (LRF) are specially designed as segmentation of a global RGB-D camera, to improve robot perception, allowing obstacle avoidance and environment mapping. This infrastructure enables the evaluation of new strategies to improve manufacturing productivity, without compromising the production by automation faults.
Highlights
The advanced manufacturing introduces intelligent behaviors to improve productivity, allowing more flexible products, in smart factories
The warehouse logistics is structured in a set of discrete sequential stages, resulting in a warehouse machine state, as shown in Figure 3, and these stages are virtually stamped in the real scenario
The WsBot is designed for wireless recharging with inductive power transfer (IPT) technology, which allows recharging without any physical connection, only needing to position the robot near to the charging station
Summary
The advanced manufacturing introduces intelligent behaviors to improve productivity, allowing more flexible products, in smart factories. The vast majority of the works carried out in this area focus on the study of science related to the collective behavior of swarms [16,17,18] In this way, the robots are based on characteristics that bring them closer to the features found in nature [19], such as decentralization [20,21] and limited communication between robots [22]. AR is one of the most promising technologies in the context of Industry 4.0 [29] and contributes to industries that want to optimize their systems, avoiding complex simulation models, expensive hardware setup and a highly controlled environment, in the various stages of development of smart factories [27] In this sense, this work discusses a novel approach to the experimentation of MRS in industrial environments.
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