Online evaluation of manipulation tasks for mobile robots in Industry 4.0 scenarios

The concepts of “Industry 4.0” are founded on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that interact flexibly with each other. The system is no longer an individual robot equipped with a predefined set of sensors, drives and manipulators. Furthermore, it represents a task-specific selection of all available CPS in a certain area. This adaptive composition provides flexible handling of varying environmental conditions and stabilizes the perception quality related to the current task requests. But the permanent adaptation includes a number of challenging tasks - the selection and adjustment of the involved CPS has to be done on run-time now. In this paper we propose a new approach for analyzing CPS configurations for manipulation tasks. If a mobile robot has to handle an object, the algorithm explores all available actuators and sensors. The proposed concept applies a graph-based model to define the individual failures of each component and the geometrical links in between. Based on this representation, all suitable combinations are determined, the expected failure level is calculated and compared in relation to the requested handling precision.