Modular ROS Based Autonomous Mobile Industrial Robot System for Automated Intelligent Manufacturing Applications

The objective of this paper is to develop a modular Robot Operating System (ROS) based autonomous mobile industrial robot system for automated intelligent manufacturing applications. We propose a finite state machine based method to integrate and manage various modular functions on the mobile manipulator which makes it have a great talent on mobility and manipulation. For mobility, we perform simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) on our robot to build a map and locate itself. We also develop navigation and collision avoidance strategies, so that it can navigate to anywhere it plans in the indoor environment. For manipulation, we use an RGB-D camera on the end effector to perform eye-in-hand system which given an image and point cloud, leveraging the learning-based object detection and shape-based grasping pose estimation to achieve flexible manipulation capabilities. In the experiments, we have developed an Autonomous Mobile Industrial Robot (AMIR) with a carefully designed mechanism and a fully modular ROS environment in our robotics lab at NTU. In the experiments, we construct an intelligent industrial scenario: collecting materials and delivering products from one place to another. Using our ROS based architecture to control the data/command flow between functions, we have successfully completed the demonstration of the system and proved the stability of the system.

I. Introduction

In the traditional industry, humans are capable of doing complex tasks playing a major role in factories. However, the efficiency of the labor intensity factory is low in the modern industry. To obtain high efficiency, industrial robots are used to replace some human jobs such as stacking, sorting and component soldering, so the way how to make humans and machines work interactively is gaining popularity [1] . However, in recent years, mobile manipulators [2] are growing up due to the abilities of both manipulation and mobility, they can do many more jobs than industrial robots can do such as delivering, large-scale assembling and painting. However, mobile manipulators are also more complex than a single industrial robot or mobile robot. In this paper, we aim to design a system to integrate the functions of the mobile robot and industrial robot to fulfill a common industrial scenario: collecting the material and delivering products for humans from place to place.