Towards a robot fleet for intra-logistic tasks: Combining free robot navigation with multi-robot coordination at bottlenecks

Fast re-organization of a production facility and its production flows enables the automated and efficient production of individualized products up to a lot size of one single instance in large-scale. Flexible service robots replacing hard wired transportation belts are one of the enablers of the Industry 4.0 idea. Within this paper we propose a distributed approach for autonomous robots forming a fleet capable of performing transportation tasks within an industrial production system. The system is able to adapt to changes in the production flow by changing the software configuration only. The presented approach combines the predictability and efficiency of path based navigation with the flexibility of fast reactive local obstacle avoidance. The combination enables reliable, predictable and robust navigation of many robots in a fleet, that are able to cope with the challenges of a dynamic environment such as obstacles blocking the way and persons moving around.