Hardware and software architecture of ABBY: An industrial mobile manipulator

Industrial robotic manipulators have successfully automated many stationary factory tasks, but there exist many other tasks which could be automated given a mobile platform. One such task is kitting, the process of gathering the constituent elements of a larger unit (the “kit”) from inventory. ABBY is a prototype of a low-price industrial mobile manipulator platform chiefly composed of an ABB IRB-120 industrial robotic manipulator and an Invacare electric wheelchair base. Use of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and ROS Industrial facilitated development and drivers for ABB industrial manipulators have been contributed back to the ROS Industrial project. ABBY is designed to autonomously navigate a factory to populate and deliver kits to workstations. This paper describes the prototype robot constructed to pursue this research, including the use of ROS and ROS Industrial to facilitate and accelerate system development.