A service-oriented orchestration and planning tool for plug and produce manufacturing: a deformable object handling supervision paradigm

ABSTRACT

Recurrent production changes due to shortened product lifecycles besides the increased complexity, that the industry 4.0 paradigm brings, highlight the need for tools that are able to seamlessly orchestrate intelligent resource agents and guarantee rapid commissioning times. This paper presents a complete package for the creation, debugging, editing, management and execution of complex work schedules of robotic systems, named Workcell Controller. The controller is capable of simultaneously orchestrating multiple resources and modules or managing errors based on the real-time shopfloor’s state. For greater applicability and compatibility, it is completely integrated with the ROS framework, meaning that standard ROS interfaces, functionalities and practices can be deployed. An intuitive web-based graphical user interface is designed for offering high usability even for novice users during programming and execution phases. The proposed package has been deployed and tested in two use cases inspired from the composites industry, demonstrating the controller’s applicability, usability and short ramp up times.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning
• scheduling
• plug and produce
• service-oriented manufacturing
• reconfigurable manufacturing systems
• human robot collaboration

Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by “MERGING – Manipulation Enhancement through Robotic Guidance and Intelligent Novel Grippers” project, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (H2020-DT-FoF-12-2019) with grant agreement ID: 869963. No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the European Commission [869963].