Automation and robotics are two enablers for developing the Smart Factory of the Future, which is based on intelligent machines and collaboration between robots and humans. Especially in final assembly and its material handling, where traditional automation is challenging to use, collaborative robot (cobot) systems may increase the flexibility needed in future production systems. A major obstacle to deploy a truly collaborative application is to design and implement a safe and efficient interaction between humans and robot systems while maintaining industrial requirements such as cost and productivity. Advanced and intelligent control strategies is the enabler when creating this safe, yet efficient, system, but is often hard to design and build. This paper highlights and discusses the challenges in meeting safety requirements according to current safety standards, starting with the mandatory risk assessment and then applying risk reduction measures, when transforming a typical manual final assembly station into an intelligent collaborative station. An important conclusion is that current safety standards and requirements must be updated and improved and the current collaborative modes defined by the standards community should be extended with a new mode, which in this paper is refereed to the deliberative planning and acting mode.
In many modern automation solutions, manual off-line programming is being replaced by online algorithms that dynamically perform tasks based on the state of the environment. Complexities of such systems are pushed even further with collaboration among robots and humans, where intelligent machines and learning algorithms are replacing more traditional automation solutions. This chapter describes the development of an industrial demonstrator using a control infrastructure called Sequence Planner (SP), and presents some lessons learned during development. SP is based on ROS2 and it is designed to aid in handling the increased complexity of these new systems using formal models and online planning algorithms to coordinate the actions of robots and other devices. During development, SP can auto generate ROS nodes and message types as well as support continuous validation and testing. SP is also designed with the aim to handle traditional challenges of automation software development such as safety, reliability and efficiency. In this chapter, it is argued that ROS2 together with SP could be an enabler of intelligent automation for the next industrial revolution.
This paper presents an approach to collision-free, long-range trajectory generation for a mobile robot in an industrial environment with static and dynamic obstacles. For the long range planning a visibility graph together with A* is used to find a collision-free path with respect to the static obstacles. This path is used as a reference path to the trajectory planning algorithm that in addition handles dynamic obstacles while complying with the robot dynamics and constraints. A Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) solver generates a collision-free trajectory by staying close the initial path but at the same time obeying all constraints. The NMPC problem is solved efficiently by leveraging the new numerical optimization method Proximal Averaged Newton for Optimal Control (PANOC). The algorithm was evaluated by simulation in various environments and successfully generated feasible trajectories spanning hundreds of meters in a tractable time frame.
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