Integration of autonomous mobile robots into the industrial production environment

The raising automation of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) demands flexible automated material handling and transport systems. Furtheron new concepts of information processing of FMS are necessary in order to reach optimal economic results with complex production systems. The realisation of a flexible transport system using a mobile robot will be shown. The further development, also presented in this paper, leads to an autonomous mobile robot, which improves the flexibility for material handling processes and supports distributed control processing for a whole FMS.