An architecture for efficient reuse in flexible production scenarios

Traditionally, small batch production has not been automated — it has been too resource demanding compared to the expected benefit. However, this is set to change with the new developments in easily trainable robotic co-worker systems, capable of being adapted to new tasks through intuitive user interaction. The main concern addressed in this paper is the creation of an architecture, which facilitates flexible robotic systems, and enables hardware-independent system configuration, while providing users of the system with the possibility to instruct and modify process descriptions for industrial tasks. We present the DTI Robot CoWorker architecture, which is a generic robotic architecture, which provides a system-independent execution framework for adaptive and interactive robotic applications. Our approach has proven viable as we have successfully automated a complicated integration task (among many others), which have previously been turned down by several robotics and automation integrators as the integration efforts, and associated risks, were deemed too extensive.