Production assistants: The rob@work family

Abstract

Mobile robots offer a high potential for future manufaturing and assembly. To this day the co-operation and co-action is in these fields hardly applicable, because of safety regulations, insufficient technology and its missing integration. In order to fill the gap this paper presents the hard- and software design of the mobile assistant rob@work 2. This system is the second iteration of the rob@work system.. As an exemplary work the conditions of a prototypic industrial application are analyzed and devided into modes of operation which are portable to generic assembly processes. For each mode of operation the safety requirements for human-robot interaction are surveyed taking into account recent regulations. In order to evaluate the performance of the robotic system, repeatability benchmarks and respective measurements are presented.