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Fontys Minor Adaptive Robotics 2017
One of the problems in Industry 4.0 is the just-in-time delivery of products or parts to assembly stations or for shipping to the customer. Due to the nature of Industry 4.0, low volume high complexity products, conventional assembly procedures do not meet the requirements for this new work flow. Having a big warehouse full of assembled products or parts are not cost-effective in this situation. By using small mobile robots capable of transporting singular or small quantities of parts or products, the throughput can be maintained, combined with the flexibility required by Industry 4.0.
This implementation seeks to avoid using a fleet manager, and gives the robots the ability to choose which commands to complete. By using a heterogeneous "swarm" of robots this implementation seeks to provide a decentralized system to transport a diverse set of products, in which the robots have the capability to accept or decline orders based on the requirements for the order. The system attempts to optimize the product flow in time, by having the robot closest to the pick-up location and the required space available pick up the order.
The hardware design details can be found on the Hardware page.
In this implementation of the project, the robots have the autonomy and the authority to make decisions based on the received requests and the data from each other. To this point custom software has been developed which is discussed on the Software page.
There is also a paper available about this minor. For the paper click the following link : paper.