Requirements for Designing and Controlling Autonomous Collaborative Robots System – An Industrial Case

Abstract

Automation and Robotics have been described as two of the enabling technologies for the Industry 4.0 paradigm, especially the use of autonomous and collaborative robot systems that can work together with humans and other machines. In manual assembly for example, these so-called co-bot systems (that also includes autonomous transportation and specialized machines) can improve the automation level, product quality, as well as human working conditions. However, in order to fully benefit from co-bot systems, many challenges need to be addressed before it can be introduced in complex industries e.g. the truck industry. This paper presents a number of challenges and requirements identified during an industrial use case, where autonomous co-bot systems have been introduced into an existing manual assembly station. These requirements are related to safe and intuitive interactions, smart tools, the need to manage variability as well as the need for highly flexible communication and control. During the use case, a number of initial solutions was developed where the implemented control architecture was based on the framework Robot Operation System (ROS) and Sequence Planner (SP).