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Dynamic, Model-based Reconfiguration for Flexible Robotic Assembly Lines

Authors:
Niki Kousi
Christos Gkournelos
Sotiris Aivaliotis
George Michalos
Sotiris Makris

Keywords: Mobile robots; flexibility; perception; digital world; sensor data synthesis.

Abstract:
The European industry is becoming more customer centric in an approach to meet the varying customers’ demand and minimize the costs of large inventories. The optimized production capacity that is achieved by the fixed production model can no longer guarantee the sustainability inside a fluctuating market that constantly requests new models. This creates the need to deploy flexible production systems exploiting the capabilities of multiple resources including both robots and human operators. Motivated by this need, this paper introduces the usage of mobile dual arm robots that are able to autonomously navigate in different workstations to undertake multiple operations, acting as assistants to human workers. A digital world model infrastructure for enabling this dynamic performance achieving process level reconfiguration, through robot’s behavior adaptation is discussed. This system is based on a multiple sensor data synthesis mechanism that facilitates the real time shopfloor status digital representation. Static objects and moving obstacles, as well as human presence are identified inside this model enabling the robots’ behavior adaptation through reasoning upon them. The suggested infrastructure has been deployed and tested in a case study from the automotive industry.

Pages: 15 to 20

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2019

Publication date: June 2, 2019

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3913

ISBN: 978-1-61208-712-2

Location: Athens, Greece

Dates: from June 2, 2019 to June 6, 2019