Modelling and Scheduling Autonomous Mobile Robot for a Real-World Industrial Application

The paper deals with a real-world implementation of autonomous industrial mobile robot performing an industrial application at a factory of a pump manufacturer. In the implementation, the multi-criteria optimization problem of scheduling tasks of a mobile robot is also taken into account. The paper proposes an approach composing of: a mobile robot system design (“Little Helper”), an appropriate and comprehensive industrial application (multiple-part feeding tasks), an implementation concept for industrial environments (the bartender concept), and a real-time heuristics integrated into Mission Planning and Control software to schedule the mobile robot in the industrial application. Results from the real-world implementation show that “Little Helper” is capable of successfully serving four part feeders in three production cells within a given planning horizon using the best schedule generated from the real-time heuristics. The results also demonstrated that the proposed real-time heuristics has capability of finding the best schedule in online production mode.