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.

中文翻译：

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开发用于向工业AGV添加协作机器人的解决方案

目的

工业4.0计划（其最终目标是彻底改变供应链）更加重视智能和自治系统，从而创造了新的机会来为自动化制造系统增加灵活性和敏捷性。这些系统旨在使人们摆脱单调和重复的任务，使他们能够专注于基于知识的工作。这些重复功能之一是订单拣选任务，该任务包括从仓库（仓库）收集零件并将它们分配到订购站之间。订单拣选系统还可以从工作站挑选成品零件，以将其带到仓库。本文的目的是提出机器人订单拣选系统的简化模型，即由自动导引车（AGV）组成的移动操纵器，

设计/方法/方法

还介绍了有关其实现的详细信息。需要AGV来安全地在工厂基础架构内导航，即在仓库和位于车间或其他位置的工作站之间。为此，选择了Active Space Automation的ActiveONE AGV。协作机器人操纵器用于将零件移入/移入移动平台（为工作站进料并为仓库移走零件）。选择了Kassow Robots的合作机器人（型号KR 810），由合作公司Roboplan（葡萄牙）和Kassow Robotics（丹麦）提供。Arduino MKR1000开发板还用于互连用户界面，AGV和协作机器人。图形用户界面是使用Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 IDE在C＃中开发的，

发现

最终的原型在合作伙伴公司的仓库（Active Space Automation）中得到了充分的演示，并构成了可能的订单拣选解决方案，可以将其集成到将来工厂的高级解决方案中。

创意/价值

提出并充分展示了一种解决方案，该解决方案可完全自动化工业车间的订单拣选任务。目的是设计一个易于使用，适应不同应用程序的系统，并且该系统可以成为高级订单拣选系统的基本基础架构。该系统运行良好，可以执行在工业4.0场景中工作的订单拣选系统所需的所有功能，在该场景中，人和机器必须充当同事。尽管所有系统设计目标均已实现，但仍有机会改进和增加所介绍解决方案的功能。在改进方面，最终设置将使用不同的机械手，具体取决于移动对象的类型。可以大大减少AGV机载设备的数量，从而释放空间并减轻AGV的重量。例如，控制计算机可以由单板计算机代替而没有任何优势。另外，协作机器人应配备腕式摄像机，以识别物体和地标。这将使协作机器人能够完全识别要拾取和放置的对象的位置和方向。腕式摄像机还应使用垃圾箱收集软件来完全识别要拾取的物体的形状以及它们的相对位置（例如，如果它们随机位于盒子中）。这些功能很容易添加到已开发的移动操纵器中，因为市场上有一些视觉系统（其中一些已与选定的协作机器人集成）可以轻松集成到解决方案中。