Towards Reactive Robot Applications in Dynamic Environments

Traditionally, industrial robots have been deployed in fairly static environments, to perform highly dedicated tasks. These robots perform with very high precision and throughput. However, nowadays there is an increasing demand for utilizing robots in more dynamic environments, also performing more flexible and less specialized operations — high mix/low volume. Both traditional industrial robots and force-limited robots are used in collaborative, dynamic environments. Such robot applications introduce new challenges when it comes to efficiency and robustness. In this paper, we propose an architecture for reactive multi-robot applications in the context of dynamic environments, and we analyze the main research challenges that must be tackled for its realization. A logistics use case, with robots picking customer orders from the shelves of a warehouse, is used as a running example to support the description of the key challenges.