E|Flow II - Infrastructural Sensor Concepts to Digitize the Workspace for Sustainable and Resource Efficient Intralogistics

Abstract

Nowadays material flow in factories is realized by different concepts of transport. Each of those specific conveyers has pros and cons due to its concept. In general, the state of art of transport systems have a low flexibility of the path planning and are not suitable for dynamic transport requirements, wherefore they are designed for a specific application. Generally, the common systems cover a specific task of transportation and can fulfill a predefined maximum amount of transportation orders. Therefore, it is necessary that the next generations of production lines, especially the intralogistics transportation systems, have to be designed more adaptable and flexible. The object of the research in this paper is a cyber-physical material flow system with flexible, autonomous and collaborative vehicles combined with centralized sensors to digitize the workspace. These sensors are a combination of commonly used USB cameras with a single board computer to realize an embedded senor system. The whole device is mounted to the ceiling of a factory to digitize the workspace. The single board computer proceed the scenario below the camera and provides the results of the code via WLAN to a central device on the one side, on the other side directly to the autonomous vehicles within the scenario. The algorithm separates moving obstacle by calculating an adaptive background picture. The obstacles are marked with a rotatable rectangle which coordinates are submitted to the vehicles. The adaptive background picture is provided by service to the central device, where the background pictures of all sensors are merged together. Here, a morphologic algorithm separates static obstacles and marks the space where the vehicles can operate. This approach leads to a performant and low cost sensor architecture for an infrastructural sensor concept to realize a digital twin of a workspace.