AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION IN A MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENT

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) that incorporate transport robots are currently dominated by the use of automatic guided vehicles (AGV's). These AGV's generally require significant restructuring of the workplace in order for them to be useful. The concept of flexibility in manufacturing is somewhat compromised by this strategy.Our previous work in mobile robots, resulting in the autonomous robot architecture (AuRA), is applied to the manufacturing domain. This approach, which is contrary to the AGV methodology, embeds significant amounts of knowledge (both environmental and behavioral) to ultimately give a mobile robot far greater latitude in interacting with its environment.This paper presents the motivation, simulation studies, and experimental results demonstrating the feasibility of migrating schema-based navigation into a FMS. In particular, the creation of a docking motor schema to accomplish interaction with the workplace is detailed. © 1990 IEEE