Fleet Management System for an Industry Environment

Abstract

The article deals with the management of a fleet of AMR robots that perform logistics in production. The entire system design is implemented in the ROS environment - state of the art for the development in robotics. Four already available solutions for fleet management in ROSe are analyzed in detail in the article. These solutions fail when there is a need to change the route plan in a dynamically changing environment. Likewise, some did not sufficiently synchronize the movement of the robots and collisions occurred or, with a larger number of robots, represented an enormous computational load. Our solution was designed to be as simple and reliable as possible for industrial use. It is based on a combination of semi-autonomous and centralized approach. A hybrid map is used for planning the movement of the robot fleet, which provides the advantages of both a metric and a topological map. This route map for a fleet of robots can be easily drawn in readily available CAD software. Synchronization of robots was designed on the principle of semaphore or mutex, which enabled the use of bidirectional paths. The results are verified in simulations and were aimed at verifying the proposed robot synchronization. It was confirmed that the proposed synchronization slows down the robots, but there were no collision situations. By separating route planning from synchronization, we simplified the entire fleet management process and thus created a very efficient system for network and hardware resources. In addition, the system is easily expandable.