Evaluation of use cases of autonomous mobile robots in factory environments

Abstract

The current research goal in the field of robotics is to develop collaborative robots that can safely share their workspace with human coworkers. While there are working solutions to protect humans from damages induced by the body of the robot there are still challenges in the field of tool and work piece safety. When these challenges are completed one of the next steps will be to enable these currently spatial static robots to move freely in their working environment by mounting them to a mobile platform. In the context of future factories this enables new use cases and automatization scenarios that are not possible today. This paper shows several of these future use cases by systematically evaluating current factory structures and deducting areas for mobile robot support. To verify the theoretical results, several interviews with representatives of German companies in different market branches have been conducted and evaluated in the course of this publication. This paper is the basic work to a method for planning the application of mobile robots in future factories. The outlook describes further steps in the research, including necessary data to successfully complete certain use cases, considerations on fleet and task manager design, as well as influences of the application of mobile robots on the general factory planning methodology.