From autonomous assembly robots to service robots for factories

Besides the typical use of industrial robots in a manufacturing setting, new application areas for robots have been appearing during the past few years. In these areas, service robots perform general purpose activities without requiring repeated high speed movements or other requirements of industrial robot applications. For the development of service robots, the use and integration of research results obtained in the autonomous robot field is much more necessary than for the development of robots used in manufacturing. Both, high autonomy during service performance and simple system access, which also means flexible programming or user-friendly system control is desired over an easily operated man/machine interface. In this paper, properties of service robots are defined and some similarities and differences between service robots and fully autonomous robots are explained. The enhancement of an existing autonomous assembly robot, which is made to be a flexible service robot for industrial environments, is considered. The paper concludes with a running experiment, which shows how this robot prototype is used for different tasks in a manufacturing line