Artificial Intelligence Task Planning of Cooperating Low-Cost Mobile Manipulators: A Case Study on a Fully Autonomous Manufacturing Application

Abstract

Through the highly innovative processes introduced by the movement Industry 4.0, application of fully autonomous working processes is ready to be integrated into real-world manufacturing applications. While many tasks still require the human to handle particular parts or perform certain steps in the production chain, partial assembly may be performed by cooperating mobile manipulators in the near future. However, many smaller companies already fail to adapt to the new trends, as Industry 4.0, in spite of its beneficial aspects, is costly to implement, particularly in still low-automated sectors. In this work, we show how artificial intelligence task planning may be integrated with computer vision systems to achieve a fully autonomous manufacturing process. We also show how low-cost robots are adapted to process demands on diverse system levels.