TeamBotS - A tool-supported methodology for developing software for dynamic teams of robots

工业机器人是当今高效自动化的重要组成部分。它们以一种独特的方式将高灵活性、速度和精度结合在一起，这使它们与其他自动化技术相比脱颖而出。然而，在大多数情况下，工业机器人用于任务变化有限的大规模生产，例如在汽车行业。考虑到工业4.0和物联网等倡议，机器人将在智能工厂中发挥更大的作用，生产高度定制化、高变化性和小批量的产品。以孤立方式工作的单个机器人将不足以满足上述要求。相反，需要具备组建灵活的机器人团队的能力。通过使用不同的、可互换的工具，创建了多功能机器人单元，从而大幅提高了灵活性、性能和健壮性。另一方面，规划和编程达到了一个新的复杂程度。建议TeamBotS解决了这种复杂性。目标是为动态组建多功能机器人团队的控制软件开发创建一种工具支持的方法学。为了实现这一点，开发了一种包括不同工装的机器人团队技能建模方法。这允许与机器人团队一起灵活地计划、调度和执行过程任务。此外，开发了用于从产品的建造计划自动导出工艺步骤、找到那些步骤到具有兼容技能的可能的机器人团队的分配以及利用高度并行化来计算无冲突执行时间表以改善周期时间的技术。机器人团队技能模型有助于更好地控制规划的复杂性。最后，技能模型使机器人团队动作的编程以及这些动作的执行变得更容易。为了在实践中实现这一点，提出了在分布式机器人控制器上同步硬实时执行动作的新概念，该方法集成了过程和自动化领域的所有级别的专家。开发的理论结果被合并到一个原型工具中，使结果对领域专家有用。在此基础上，将该方法应用于两个案例研究--碳纤维增强塑料部件的生产和家具的组装，并对其进行了评价。

Industrial robots are an important building block for efficient automation nowadays. They combine high flexibility, velocity and precision in a unique way, which makes them stand out compared to other automation techniques. In most cases, however, industrial robots are used for mass production with limited variability of tasks, like e.g. in the automotive industry. Considering initiatives like Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, robots will play an even larger role in intelligent factories, producing highly customized products with high variability and in small lot sizes. Single robots working in an isolated manner will not be sufficient to address the aforementioned requirements. Instead, the ability to form flexible teams of robots is required. By using different, interchangeable toolings, multi-functional robot cells are created that offer a drastic increase in flexibility, performance and robustness. On the other hand, planning and programming reaches a new level of complexity.The proposal TeamBotS addresses this complexity. The goal is to create a tool-supported methodology for the development of control software of dynamically forming multi-functional robot teams. To achieve this, an approach for modelling skills of robot teams including different toolings is developed. This allows for flexible planning, scheduling and execution of process tasks with robot teams. Furthermore, techniques are developed for automatically deriving process steps from the products' construction plans, finding allocations of those steps to possible robot teams with compatible skills and calculating collision-free execution schedules with a high degree of parallelization to improve cycle times. The robot team skill model helps to better control planning complexity. Finally, the skill model enables easier programming of robot team actions as well as execution of those actions. To achieve this in practice, new concepts for synchronized hard real-time execution of actions on distributed robot controllers are developed.The proposed approach integrates experts from process as well as automation domains on all levels. The developed theoretical results are incorporated in a prototypical tool that makes the results usable for the domain experts. On this basis, the approach is applied to and evaluated against two case studies - production of carbon-fibre reinforced plastic components and assembly of pieces of furniture.