Indoor-GPS based robots as a key technology for versatile production

Countries with low-cost work forces put pressure on enterprises world wide to focus on innovation. As innovation is projected on the products, the improvement of the efficiency of production processes is one of the key enablers for market competition, resulting in automation and management strategies for quality, innovation and information. WZL at RWTH Aachen University covers the field of versatile production systems. Versatile production systems are one step ahead of flexible production systems. The idea is to be able to choose the degree of flexibility according to the production need and therefore be much more effective as flexible systems with a high complexity rate. As industrial robots are very flexible entities the question is how to utilize them as versatile production systems. Industrial robots are not able to move with a high absolute precision today. One possible solution to enable robot movements consistent to simulated models and therefore decrease the complexity is to provide sensor information for the guidance of robots. By extending the abilities of Indoor-GPS, a six degrees of freedom measurement system robust against visibility voids, robots may recognize path deviations and therefore react to changes of their environment. The uncertainty and dynamics currently achievable by Indoor-GPS are not sufficient for a dynamic industrial application. First results of analyzing the absolute positioning of the robots by means of Indoor-GPS guidance are presented. The use of a Kalmanfilter as the best estimator for the position guidance and the data fusion of different data sources is proposed to increase dynamics and precision of the measurement system to position robots with different or unknown work piece loads on different positions directly by the use of offline programs without further adjustment needs.