Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulation (AIMM) - Maturation, Exploitation and Implementation: Identifying Skills for AIMM Robots

Research output: PhD thesis

Abstract

The overall topic of this PhD thesis is Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulation (AIMM) - maturation, exploitation and implementation. The thesis addresses two topics.
The first topic is “From research to industry” and the challenges this holds. The Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulator (AIMM) "Little Helper" is introduced, a manufacturing assistant inspired by the Walt Disney character. The main rationale of the AIMM concept is a compromise between traditional automation (efficiency) and manual labor (flexibility), which contributes to realizing transformable manufacturing systems. From a state-of-the-art review, it is observed that implementations of mobile manipulators in industry have been limited although the needs for flexible automation are present.
The second topic is “Identifying skills for AIMM robots” and is dedicated to defining a unifying terminology for task-level programming by means of skills with focus on the identification of skills for AIMM robots. The terminology is built as a hierarchy similar to that of human action modeling (e.g. actions and activities) or human language (e.g. words and sentences). Two approaches are applied for identifying relevant skills for AIMM robots. Firstly an application-based analysis is conducted, to identify skills in the logistic domain, based on real-world experiments at the industrial partner. Secondly an analysis based on standard operating procedures (SOPs) is conducted.
Original languageEnglish
Edition83
Print ISBNs87-91464-38-2
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2012

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