Development of a solution for adding a collaborative robot to an industrial AGV

Abstract

Purpose The Industry 4.0 initiative – with its ultimate objective of revolutionizing the supply-chain – putted more emphasis on smart and autonomous systems, creating new opportunities to add flexibility and agility to automatic manufacturing systems. These systems are designed to free people from monotonous and repetitive tasks, enabling them to concentrate in knowledge-based jobs. One of these repetitive functions is the order-picking task which consists of collecting parts from storage (warehouse) and distributing them among the ordering stations. An order-picking system can also pick finished parts from working stations to take them to the warehouse. The purpose of this paper is to present a simplified model of a robotic order-picking system, i.e. a mobile manipulator composed by an automated guided vehicle (AGV), a collaborative robot (cobot) and a robotic hand. Design/methodology/approach Details about its implementation are also presented. The AGV is needed to safely navigate inside the factory infrastructure, namely, between the warehouse and the working stations located in the shop-floor or elsewhere. For that purpose, an ActiveONE AGV, from Active Space Automation, was selected. The collaborative robot manipulator is used to move parts from/into the mobile platform (feeding the working stations and removing parts for the warehouse). A cobot from Kassow Robots was selected (model KR 810), kindly supplied by partner companies Roboplan (Portugal) and Kassow Robotics (Denmark). An Arduino MKR1000 board was also used to interconnect the user interface, the AGV and the collaborative robot. The graphical user interface was developed in C# using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 IDE, taking advantage of this experience in this type of language and programming environment. Findings The resulting prototype was fully demonstrated in the partner company warehouse (Active Space Automation) and constitutes a possible order-picking solution, which is ready to be integrated into advanced solutions for the factories of the future. Originality/value A solution to fully automate the order-picking task at an industrial shop-floor was presented and fully demonstrated. The objective was to design a system that could be easy to use, to adapt to different applications and that could be a basic infrastructure for advanced order-picking systems. The system proved to work very well, executing all the features required for an order-picking system working in an Industry 4.0 scenario where humans and machines must act as co-workers. Although all the system design objectives were accomplished, there are still opportunities to improve and add features to the presented solution. In terms of improvements, a different robotic hand will be used in the final setup, depending on the type of objects that are being required to move. The amount of equipment that is located on-board of the AGV can be significantly reduced, freeing space and lowering the weight that the AGV carries. For example, the controlling computer can be substituted by a single-board-computer without any advantage. Also, the cobot should be equipped with a wrist camera to identify objects and landmark. This would allow the cobot to fully identify the position and orientation of the objects to pick and drop. The wrist camera should also use bin-picking software to fully identify the shape of the objects to pick and also their relative position (if they are randomly located in a box, for example). These features are easy to add to the developed mobile manipulator, as there are a few vision systems in the market (some that integrate with the selected cobot) that can be easily integrated in the solution. Finally, this paper reports a development effort that neglected, for practical reasons, all issues related with certification, safety, training, etc. A future follow-up paper, reporting a practical use-case implementation, will properly address those practical and operational issues.

Mobile Robots and Cobots Integration: A Preliminary Design of a Mechatronic Interface by Using MBSE Approach

“…Bostelman et al [18] present a review of the main AMMs and a set of evaluation criteria to assess their performances while Unger et al [19] present a critical investigation of generic use cases where the AMMs can be applied. D'Souza et al [20] present a hardware and software integration of cobot and AGV without taking into account safety aspects.…”

“…A solution for adding a collaborative robot to an industrial AGV is suggested by D'Souza [20] who propose a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to command and manage the whole system performance. The designed GUI communicates through a wi-fi connection with an Arduino board which dispatches specific commands towards the AGV and manipulator using an interface based on I/O digital signals.…”

Organizational Agility in Industry 4.0: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Smart manufacturing is a computer-aided and integrated manufacturing system which automates the stream of manufacturing activities [70]. The researchers discuss smart manufacturing technologies with respect to agility in the organizations [71,72] as they significantly enhance supply chain [73], workforce [47], process [74], information system [75], organizational flexibility [76], management [77], manufacturing [78] and technology [79] agility in the organizations. Moreover, they provide wide-ranging agility to the companies [80].…”

“…The IoT is one of the most important parts of Industry 4.0 ecosystem [121], and transitioning from traditional to Industry 4.0 environment requires the implementation of IoT and platforms [122]. Moreover, IoT platforms are also instruments used in enhancing the organizational agility [100] as they increase the agility of organizations with respect to the process [60], information system [91], facility [89], flexibility [71], management [117], manufacturing [61] and technology [79]. The embedding of (organizational) objects with the internet creates communication between them, and these objects start to exchange data among themselves [69], which results in the effective automation in the organization.…”

A Mobile Robotized System for Depalletizing Applications: Design and Experimentation

“…In the area of mobile collaborative robotics, a solution is presented in [9] for adding collaborative features to an industrial AGV. The mobile manipulator is designed for pick-and-place operations of generic-shaped objects, on a simplified pallet.…”