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The current industrial scenario demands advances that depend on expensive and sophisticated solutions. Augmented Reality (AR) can complement, with virtual elements, the real world. Faced with this features, an AR experience can meet the demand for prototype testing and new solutions, predicting problems and failures that may only exist in real situations. This work presents an environment for experimentation of advanced behaviors in smart factories, allowing experimentation with multi-robot systems (MRS), interconnected, cooperative, and interacting with virtual elements. The concept of ARENA introduces a novel approach to realistic and immersive experimentation in industrial environments, aiming to evaluate new technologies aligned with the Industry 4.0. The proposed method consists of a small-scale warehouse, inspired in a real scenario characterized in this paper, managing by a group of autonomous forklifts, fully interconnected, which are embodied by a swarm of tiny robots developed and prepared to operate in the small scale scenario. The AR is employed to enhance the capabilities of swarm robots, allowing box handling and virtual forklifts. Virtual laser range finders (LRF) are specially designed as segmentation of a global RGB-D camera, to improve robot perception, allowing obstacle avoidance and environment mapping. This infrastructure enables the evaluation of new strategies to improve manufacturing productivity, without compromising the production by automation faults.

Functional Digital Mock-up (FDMU) and Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) are two keywords arising in the last years in simulation technology. In this paper, we would like to show that both principles, aiming at a comprehensive investigation of heterogeneous systems, e.g. from mechatronics, are not necessarily competing with each other but may be combined to benefit from the ideas behind. The approaches are based on different ideas and cover different aspects of the interaction of modern simulation tools. For that reason different constraints have to be considered, which do not make things easier. Both principles have advantages and disadvantages. However, by combining both ways, a powerful framework for handling a broad variety of simulation tasks can be formed. In the paper, a possible approach for integrating both technologies will be shown.

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Realizing autonomous inspection, such as that of power distribution lines, through unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems is a key research domain in robotics. In particular, the use of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles to execute the tasks of an inspection process can enhance the efficacy and safety of the operation; however, many technical problems, such as those pertaining to the precise positioning and path following of the vehicles, robust obstacle detection, and intelligent control, must be addressed. In this study, an innovative architecture involving an unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) was examined for detailed inspections of power lines. In the proposed strategy, each vehicle provides its position information to the other, which ensures a safe inspection process. The results of real-world experiments indicate a satisfactory performance, thereby demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed approach.

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This paper addresses the control of a fleet of unmanned aerial systems (UAVs), termed as drones, for flight formation problems. Getting drones to fly in formation is a relevant problem to be solved when cooperative cargo transportation is desired. A general approach for this problem considers the coordination of a fleet of UAVs, by fusing all information coming from several individual sensors posed on each UAVs. However, this approach induces a high cost as every UAV should have its advanced perception system. As an alternative, this paper proposes the use of a single perception system by a fleet composed of several elementary drones (workers) with primitive low-cost sensors and a leader drone carrying a 3D perception source. We propose a Quadral-Fuzzy approach to ensure that all drones fly in formation and will not collide with each other or with environment obstacles. We also develop a new way to compute potential fields based on possibility fuzzy (fuzziness) measure with the focus of avoiding collisions between the drones. The proposed approach encompasses four high-coupled intelligent controllers that respectively control the leader and worker drones' motion and implement obstacle and collision avoidance procedures. Simulation results using a fleet of four aerial drones are presented, showing the potential for solving usual problems to flights in formation, such as dodging obstacles, avoiding collisions between the drones, among others. INDEX TERMS Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), multi-agent systems, distance-based formation, flight-formation control, autonomous flight.