Project duration: 01.02.2017 – 31.05.2019 | Consortium leader: Fraunhofer IGCV | Project partners: 7 scientific institutes and 19 industrial partners including Yaskawa, Stäubli, MAN, Krones, bertrandt | Project homepage: http://www.forobotics.de/
Objective
Between 2017 and 2019, the Bavarian Research Network FORobotics achieved pioneering results in the field of mobile, collaborative robotics. The focus was on standardised interfaces and protocols that make it possible to flexibly combine mobile robots and humans into mixed production teams. The solutions developed enable location-flexible and autonomous robot systems that adapt to changing tasks and environmental conditions – even during ongoing production. In FORobotics, mobile robots as well as humans, each with different capability profiles, were enabled to join together into a team using standardised interfaces and protocols in order to jointly solve a production engineering task. Location-flexible and autonomous robot systems offer the potential to adapt to changing tasks and conditions – even during direct cooperation with humans.
Results
FORobotics made an important contribution to the further development of collaborative robotics in Bavaria and beyond. Through the close integration of science and industry, practical solutions for human-robot cooperation were developed that sustainably strengthen the competitiveness of small and medium-sized manufacturers.
Through application-specific combinations of human and machine capabilities and the ability to assemble teams flexibly (in terms of location) and efficiently, new potential for industrial manufacturing and assembly was unlocked. Together with research and industry partners, S4P developed novel approaches to task-oriented production planning and control:
- Structuring of orders: operation/job – task – task sequence
- Expansion of solution-neutral modelling through capabilities
- Extension of capability matching to consider specific features
- Integration of mobile resources such as AGVs into detailed planning and communication with these resources via Thingworx, OPC UA, ROS, REST or similar
- Real-time planning of task processing by the resources / teams
Industrial Benefit
FORobotics enables manufacturing companies to deploy human-robot teams flexibly and efficiently. The standardised interfaces and protocols developed lower the integration barriers for collaborative robotics and create the basis for scalable, adaptive manufacturing of the future.
Significance
As an industrial partner, S4P made a significant contribution to task-oriented production planning and control. The concepts for human-robot collaboration (HRC) developed within the network were successfully implemented in demonstrators and evaluated on the basis of real manufacturing scenarios. Following the final assessment by the Bavarian Research Foundation, the project was rated as an excellent basis for the further use of mobile robotics in production.
Publications
Are you interested in collaborative robotics or flexible human-robot teams in manufacturing? Contact us – together we will discuss how FORobotics can optimise your manufacturing process.