Assisted Planning and Setup of Collaborative Robot Applications in Modular Production Systems

Abstract

Modern production requires flexible systems to fulfill customer desires of highly specialized products down to a batch size of one. Collaborative robots are considered as the key element for a versatile and flexible production in a state-of-the-art and modular production environment. Although modularization is a well known concept since the 80s, the composition of modular fabrication units and the flexible programming of robots are still challenging and depend strongly on the experience of the industrial engineer. For this reason, we present an assisted approach for interactive workspace setup targeting the operator to plan and commission efficiently applications containing collaborative robots in flexible production systems. As a central contribution, we introduce a planning workflow to take the human-in-the-loop for the workspace configuration of the robot and the arrangement of components in the modular production system. We evaluate our contribution quantitatively in an initial experimental setup performing the automatized layout in complex configurations to showcase its effectiveness.