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Increasing the accessibility of collaborative robotics requires interfaces that support intuitive teleoperation. One possibility for an intuitive interface is offered by wearable systems that measure the operator’s movement and use the information for robot control. Such wearable systems should preserve the operator’s movement capabilities and, thus, their ability to flexibly operate in the workspace. This paper presents a novel wireless wearable system that uses only inertial measurement units (IMUs) to determine the orientation of the operator’s upper body parts. An algorithm was developed to transform the measured orientations to movement commands for an industrial collaborative robot. The algorithm includes a calibration procedure, which aligns the coordinate systems of all IMUs, the operator, and the robot, and the transformation of the operator’s relative hand motions to the movement of the robot’s end effector, which takes into account the operator’s orientation relative to the robot. The developed system is demonstrated with an example of an industrial application in which a workpiece needs to be inserted into a fixture. The robot’s motion is compared between the developed system and a standard robot controller. The results confirm that the developed system is intuitive, allows for flexible control, and is robust enough for use in industrial collaborative robotic applications.

In the context of advanced manufacturing, new models inspired by Internet technologies are being developed. The cloud manufacturing model strives to offer a similar experience for seekers of manufacturing services as cloud computing does for the users of the web: manufacturing clouds intend to offer manufacturing resources as services, much like processing power and storage space are available as services in cloud computing. The resulting business situation is favourable for both the service providers and the service end-users, especially in a highly dynamic manufacturing environment. Existing cloud manufacturing models operate in a centralised way through a cloud manufacturing platform, the management of which is identified as a critical part of the manufacturing cloud operation. In the article, a decentralised network architecture for cloud manufacturing is proposed. The architecture builds upon the concept of autonomous work systems for use as service providers. The operation of the system based on the architecture is described, wherein special attention is given to the communication within the emerged networks of service providers. Technical feasibility of the approach is also demonstrated. It is expected that the decentralised approach will enable a more flexible and scalable manufacturing cloud, which will have the ability to actively co-evolve with its environment.

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