Outline of a Hardware Reconfiguration Framework for Modular Industrial Mobile Manipulators

This paper presents concepts and ideas of a hard- ware reconfiguration framework for modular industrial mobile manipulators. Mobile manipulators pose a highly flexible pro- duction resource due to their ability to autonomously navigate between workstations. However, due to this high flexibility new approaches to the operation of the robots are needed. Reconfig- uring the robot to a new task should be carried out by shop floor operators and, thus, be both quick and intuitive. Late research has already proposed a method for intuitive robot programming. However, this relies on a predetermined hardware configuration. Finding a single multi-purpose hardware configuration suited to all tasks is considered unrealistic. As a result, the need for reconfiguration of the hardware is inevitable. In this paper an outline of a framework for making hardware reconfiguration quick and intuitive is presented. Two main drivers are identi- fied. First, the need for a method making hardware exchange quick and intuitive. This requires both hardware and software standardization. Second, the need for automatically identifying a feasible hardware configuration based on information about the given task. Both these tasks rely on the introduction of a device manager which makes the system “self-aware”. In both drivers several challenges for future research are identified.