Despite »mass customization« and a growing shortage of skilled workers, the felexibility of robot systems in industry still provide capacities. Instead, stationary and data-driven equipment is used in production. Mobile robot platforms can accelerate production as individual units that are flexible in terms of location by parallelizing processing and logistical process steps.
The research association »FORobotics - mobile, ad-hoc cooperating robot teams« pursues the innovative approach to combine the capabilities of different robots to form teams in order to increase productivity. The network develops innovative, technical solutions and methods to form in production cooperating robot teams, consisting of several robot systems or teams of robots and humans.
Research and industry partners are working together in six subprojects:
All developed methods are evaluated by means of a central use case, which was derived from real scenarios of the user companies Hefter Maschinenbau, MAN and Krones. It was based on a work system analysis.
The first tested FORobotics use case was conducted in the testbed in Augsburg. As you can see in the video, it is a use case for engine assembly. The robot picks engines from the shelf and stores them on its platform, the engine blocks are transported by the robot to the assembly station. The end user assembles the engine blocks in a holder provided for this purpose and is supported by the robot.
Fraunhofer Institute for Casting, Composite and Processing Technology IGCV