European manufacturing industry faces increasing product variances resulting as a consequence of frequent innovation, short product lifecycles, small series production, and shrinking production cycles. At the same time, production cost must be continuously reduced. Agile, transformable and re-usable automation and robotics is be a key enabler to manage those trends.
However, few robotic components are designed for easy adaptation and reuse. To overcome those shortcomings, R5-COP focuses on agile manufacturing paradigms and specifically on modular robotic systems. Based on existing and newly developed methods for a formal modeling of hardware and software components, R5-COP will support model-based design, engineering, validation, and fast commissioning.
project goal
The main objective of the R5-COP European Research project - Reconfigurable ROS-based Resilient Reasoning Robotic Cooperating Systems - is to provide the means for fast and flexible adaption of robots to quickly changing environments and conditions, to enable safe and direct human/robot cooperation and interaction on an industrial scale.
To overcome the shortcomings of existing robotic solutions, it focuses on the following objectives:
- Enabling fast and flexible re-composition of software and hardware components of robotic systems, while ensuring robust and safe operation, through the modular design of the components with formal-ized specifications and standardized interfaces.
- Enabling standardized yet simple design and implementation of software components, through using ROS Industrial for software deployment and SDKs for software development.
- Enabling standardized yet flexible (re)configuration, using ontologies of configurable components for modelling hardware and modelling applications on an app or skill level.
- Ensuring robust perception, using advanced reconfigurable sensor systems modules.
- Supporting component and system certification for safe human/robot cooperation, using dedicated V&V techniques.
- Identifying, modelling, developing and evaluating key hardware and software components, using dedicated use cases from industrial and service domains.
Research outcome
The main contribution of our Research Group, together with the Technical University of Eindhoven, is to de-velop autonomous cooperating robots that clean up the lunch area of a student restaurant using two cooperating robots, namely Amigo from TU/e and Dr Robot x80sv from Saxion. Both the AMIGO and x80sv are equipped with autonomous navigation, manipulation, target detection and localization capabilities. They both work in standalone as well as cooperative modes. During the cooperative mode, they both share the map of the world.
Duration project
Start project: 01-02-2014 - End project: 31-01-2017
Partners
The consortium of the R5COP project is composed of 31 members from 15 EU countries and it contains knowledge institutes as well as high-end companies.
More information about the project?
