CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 63 (2014) 181184

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology

jou rnal homep age : ht t p: // ees .e lse vi er . com /ci r p/ def a ult . asp

Design and simulation of assembly systems with mobile robots

George Michalos, Konstantinos Kaltsoukalas, Panagiotis Aivaliotis, Platon Sipsas,
Andreas Sardelis, George Chryssolouris (1)*
Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems and Automation, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, Patras, Greece

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Keywords:
Design method
Assembly
Robot

This paper proposes an approach to the design and operation of assembly systems that include mobile
robots. It is based on a semantic model representing the robot/resource skills along with the operations
that a resource has to execute. The method is implemented in a system capable of generating the
assignment of operations to the proper robotic resources. Collision free paths can be generated for the
assembly system robots with the help of simulation. The method is presented in a case study from the
automotive industry.
2014 CIRP.

1. Introduction
Robotic equipment has found great application in assembly
systems, mainly in the automotive, electronics, rubber/plastics and
metal/machinery industrial sectors [1]. The intrinsic characteristics of the robots such as high accuracy, speed repeatability,
strength and reliability have enabled the production rms to invest
in large scale installations that can work around the clock with
minimal intervention [2].
However, as the manufacturing trends shift towards higher
product diversication and process commonality, the manufacturing systems have presented new requirements in terms of
recongurability [3,4]. The operational exibility of robots to
handle and assemble different parts has been the major driver for
their adoption. Nevertheless, the resulting system level exibility
is limited, mainly due to the following two drawbacks. The rst one
is that robots require a xed or well constrained positioning at the
shop oor that ensures the adequate supply of consumables (air,
current, water etc.) as well as the rigidity in order for high accuracy
to be achieved. This does not allow for physical changes in the
structure and form of the assembly system. The second drawback
is the complexity in controls integration and programming of new
resources and operations. The existing control architectures make
use of hierarchical (usually based on Programmable Logical
Controllers PLC) control that requires time and expertise when
it comes to integrating new equipment. Moreover, the lack of
intuitive user interfaces results in large commissioning time even
when using Ofine Programming techniques. The current requirements are towards automating these processes and coming up
with methods that would allow the systems fast design and
eventually reconguration with minimal human intervention [5].

* Corresponding author.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cirp.2014.03.102
0007-8506/ 2014 CIRP.

By considering an architecture that can overcome these

limitations, this paper proposes an approach for designing and
detailing the operation of the assembly system. More specically,
the method is aimed at providing feasible recongurations of the
line along with detailed design of the operations to be carried out
by each robotic resource. The reconguration is achieved through
the use of mobile robotic manipulators that are capable of docking
within the assembly stations and undertaking new assembly tasks.
The attempt to commission industrial mobile manipulators has
already yielded very promising results. The latest examples involve
the introduction of a mobile manipulator for assembly applications
[6], the creation of an autonomous multi-purpose industrial robot
[7] as well as the development of a high payload mobile
manipulator for automotive Body in White (BiW) applications [8].
The design activities focus on detailing the assembly operation in
terms of motion planning, coordination with control systems etc. A
more detailed description of the processes constituting the design
stage is presented in Section 2. The method, which is presented in
Section 3, employs a semantic representation of resources that allow
the automated allocation of suitable robots to assembly tasks. A
complete set of software tools used for each activity is presented in
Section 4, while the application of the method on a case study,
stemming from the automotive industry, is presented in Section 5.
The last section is dedicated to the drawing of conclusions and
providing an outlook towards future research areas.
2. Design of assembly systems
The method attacks the near real time design of the production
process in order to adapt to both internal and external variations.
In this context, the internal variations refer to changes that are
required inside the assembly system, but should not under any
circumstances, disrupt the production process. The need for the
replacement of a malfunctioning robot and the addition of extra
robots, in a workstation, in order for the process to be sped up, are

G. Michalos et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 63 (2014) 181184

182

indicative examples. External variations refer to the production

system factors that induce requirements for changes within it. The
need to re-arrange the resources in order to produce a new model
or product family are typical examples.
The design of assembly system involves the following activities
[9]: (a) analysis of assembly methods and assembly sequence, (b)
selection of the assembly sequence, (c) determination of the
production capacity, (d) tabulation selection of available
resources and required tasks and (d) detailed workstation and
process design. In the approach discussed, activities (a) and (b) are
considered being predened and the method focuses mostly on
activities (c) and (d). More specically, the following functionalities are provided by the developed tools:

technology, was carried out via the OWL 2.0 language and the
Protege v4.1 software tool. This technology for implementing
ontologies has emerged recently for knowledge management of
manufacturing systems at all levels [12].
Fig. 1, shows the ontology graph where all classes representing
the shop oor elements are depicted. The arrows show the
relationships among the elements i.e. the assembly line consists of
stations including docking stations, tool repositories, resources etc.
Other information, such as the setup time required for a resource to
switch between operations, the allocation criteria etc. are also
stored into the ontology.

(1) Derivation of assignments between the planned/unplanned

tasks and the available resources.
(2) Generation of assembly layouts that can satisfy each of these
allocations.
(3) Automatic detailing of the assembly process by performing
collision free motion planning for the mobile platforms and the
robotic manipulators.
(4) Automatic generation of the robot programmes (including,
motion, sensing and communication) to be executed.

The Semantic web technology provides inference and reasoning

abilities. In the developed solution, these two features are
exploited at the logic level of the autonomous resources when
decision making is required with respect to the reconguration
actions to be followed. In particular, the ontology repository
module includes the ontological representation of the data models,
populated with the appropriate shop oor data for each scenario.
Further to the online and ofine data, the ontology repository is
equipped with inference rules, which are used when reasoning is
performed. These rules represent the existing knowledge regarding the shop oor manufacturing process and the resources as well
as the production tool compatibility with the production processes. For example, such a rule can represent the knowledge that for
the spot welding assembly process of a subassembly, the welding
guns current should not exceed a certain level. Such information
can be utilized, at the decision making phase, when the assignment
of the pending manufacturing tasks to a resource is being
performed [13]. The hierarchical levels of Fig. 2 have been used
to drive the assignment process.

Implementing the aforementioned activities requires that

multiple design categories such as computer based, representation
and analysis [10] be bridged under a common frame. The following
sections provide an overview of the proposed activities along with
the tools and techniques required for their implementation.
3. Method description
3.1. Semantic representation of resources

3.2. Assembly conguration and design

The rst step of the method involves the assignment of suitable

tasks to the robotic resources. The investigation of the process for
identifying and evaluating a suitable task for mobile manipulators
came up with a plethora of activities that can be supported by this
technology [11]. In order for the adequate representation of the
resources available, their characteristics and their capabilities to be
allowed, a data model has been developed in the context of this
work. Within the data model, the complete shop oor can be
described both in terms of physical elements and operations.
Resources and services are autonomous and perform the decision
making on their own. Following, the implementation of this data
model to a knowledge repository, based on the semantic web
Fig. 2. Hierarchical model for task assignment.

Fig. 1. Manufacturing ontology graph.

The data model describes the manufacturing tasks with the use
of the order, job and task model. In particular, the manufacturing of
a specic product is connected with an order. The latter is
comprises jobs assigned to specic stations and each job is
composed of tasks, which are assigned to specic resources. The
tasks have precedence constraints revealing the order in which
they have to be executed. Furthermore, there is a task resource
relation class that describes which tasks can be performed by the
proper manufacturing resource. The tasks are composed of
operations. Within the data model, an operation describes a
hardware or software activity that should be executed by one of
the resources. For instance, a hardware operation can be the
mechanical move of a robotic arm and a software operation can be
the calculation of a subassembly position and orientation by a
vision system.
By using inference rules instead of hard coded rules to represent
the existing knowledge, more exible systems can be achieved.
More decision making situations can be modelled and automated,
simply by adding new rules to the ontology repository. An already
plugged production resource does not require software updates if
new manufacturing processes are assigned to it. The nal step of

G. Michalos et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 63 (2014) 181184

183

Fig. 3. Resource architecture.

the design is the detailing of the assembly process. In this context,

open source tools have been used to generate the motion of the
robotic units. More specically, the MoveIt! [14] software package
accepts the 3D model and the kinematics of the robots as a Unied
Robot Description Format (URDF) le and can generate collision
free paths towards a target position. The coordination between the
resources, in terms of operations sequence that is traditionally
assigned to a PLC, is also assigned to the ontology service. Each
operation is registered in the repository together with its pre- and
post-conditions and the ontology service automatically generates
messages to denote the start and completion of the operations.
3.3. Resource requirements
Fig. 3, presents the structure of a service based architecture that
the robotic resources will need in order to efciently exploit the
proposed approach. In this gure, Layer 2 contains the tools that
perform the assignment of the resources and the process detailing.
Layer 1 involves the services required on the robot and mobile unit
controller side in order to (a) obtain the data for the current state of
the resource (position, time to station, alarm states etc.) and (b) to
send the detailed commands for the implementation of the designed
reconguration. Other resource dedicated services that may be used
for local control, such as the SLAM (Simultaneous localization and
mapping) can be used for the acquisition of the data required for the
decision making. To ensure compatibility with all the involved
resource, the ROS [15] programming framework can be used since it
is available for multiple robotic equipment types, including mobile
platforms and industrial manipulators.
4. System implementation
The methods and tools described in Section 3, have been
developed and integrated, under a user friendly application that
allows the systems fast redesigning when needed. The tool has
been developed as a web application in the Java programming

Fig. 4. Developed tool.

language using the Spring framework and it is hosted on an Apache

Tomcat web server. For the communication with the ontology, it
uses the Jena server module, which is also developed in Java and
uses the Jena framework to make SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and
RDF Query Language) queries to the Ontology repository.
Fig. 4, illustrates a part of the user interfaces that allows the user
to dene a new task and designate suitable resources. The outcome
is stored directly into the ontology repository and can be used
directly for the task of resource assignments. More specically,
functionalities include: adding resources to workstations, adding
tools to resources, creating jobs, adding tasks to jobs, modifying the
list of operations of each task, adding suitable resources to tasks,
editing tasks precedence constraints, executing the scheduling
algorithm, viewing the assignments generated by the planner and
initiating the execution.
Furthermore, through this application, the communication with
the robot controller can be achieved in order for the robots
coordinates to be automatically retrieved and stored into the
ontology. This is important, since it is the main input to the motion
planning software (MoveIt!) that is responsible for the motion
planning activities.
5. Automotive case study
To examine the applicability of the proposed method, a case
study stemming from the automotive industry has been selected.
This case involves an assembly station with two stationary robots
that perform cooperative welding on the oor of a passengers
vehicle. Mobile robots such as the one depicted in the CAD model of
Fig. 5 are also present in the shop oor and can be docked to the
station. The handling (a) robot is holding the part in mid-air and
the welding (b) robot is performing spot welding. The scenario
involves a malfunction of the handling robot, which cannot
continue the operation and therefore, needs to be replaced by a

Fig. 5. Path generation for the case study.

184

G. Michalos et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 63 (2014) 181184

similar one. At the ange of the handling robot, there is a gripper (c)
that is equipped with multiple connection points, thus allowing
the exchange of both the gripper and the part between the two
robots.
Upon its breakdown, the handling robot sends a signal to the
ontology service that triggers the reconguration/design process.
The tool that was presented in Section 4 is used for generating a
new set of assignments for the handling tasks, which are
eventually allocated to one of the mobile units. The mobile unit
(d) carries a robot with a type of a compatible ange as well as an
adequate payload to carry both the part and the gripper.
The rst part of the reconguration process is completed with
the command being sent to the mobile unit to navigate and dock in
the station. At the same time, the detailed designing of the mobile
robot operation is carried out. At rst, the current pose (joint
angles) of the handling robot is retrieved from the ontology. This
allows for the identication of the grippers exact location in the 3D
space and also the generation of the collision free paths, since the
malfunctioning robot is now being considered as an additional
obstacle in the station. Following, and based on the gripper
geometry, the location of the grippers second connection point is
calculated. This is the nal position of the mobile robot in order to
pick the gripper. These points are inserted into MoveIt, which
creates the trajectory of the handling robot. The outcome is shown
in Fig. 5 and its geometry has been simplied in order for the
computational time to be reduced, but without any compromises
being made as regards the derived paths feasibility.
In order for the operations continuation, from the point where
the breakdown occurred to be ensured, the rest of the operations
assigned to the stationary handling robot are also modied and
examined in the simulation package for execution feasibility by the
mobile robot. This concludes the design process and the
implementation of the derived solution can start taking place.
The use of open controllers for the robots allows the service based
execution of tasks by transmitting the motion commands directly
to the robots controller. The use of services also eliminates the
need for dening I/O signals and integration with the station PLC.
In this case, once the mobile robot has docked to the station, it
immediately starts receiving and executing the generated commands that enable the completion of the assigned operations.
6. Conclusions and outlook
This study has presented a method for designing the operation
of assembly systems that incorporate mobile robotics units
capable of undertaking multiple roles. The method can assign
assembly tasks to suitable resources and further detail the process
by automatically generating motion plans for the robots. The
hardware and software architectures that the robotic resources
need to comply with in order to exploit this method have also been
presented. With this methods application to an automotive case
study, a feasible reconguration plan allowing the replacement of a
robotic unit, without any human intervention, has been generated.
The benets of adopting such technologies over the traditional
stationary robots mainly lay in the shortened reconguration time
as well as in the reduction of the efforts required for the
commissioning of a new robot. The consideration of mobile robots
provides the potential for line level changes. In this context,
equipment mobility is of primary importance for the method.
Under this scope, the design and development of the mobile robot
are not the focus of this study, but they have been proposed for
future research. In the near future, when drawbacks, mainly

related to the calibration and accuracy of mobile robots will have

been resolved with the use of advanced sensors, such methods will
allow for the systems real time reaction without the intervention
of humans. To this direction, future research should focus on the
standardization of hardware (electrical and mechanical) and
software interfaces for achieving a seamless Plug & Produce
behaviour of the resources. Other preparatory activities such as the
connection of auxiliary devices need to be redesigned in this
direction since they are important for enabling quick reconguration when practical applications are being considered. Moreover,
the current control architectures on monolithic PLCcontrol, need
to evolve towards a more open, service oriented architecture that
would permit easier and less complex networking among the
different devices. Finally, the methods expansion to account for
processes, where humans and robots can cooperate in the same
workspace, is also a challenge [16]. The hybrid assembly systems
currently pose as the greatest challenge for the factories of the
future, whilst methods for designing the operation of such systems
need to be developed.
Acknowledgements
This work has been funded under the EU FP7 project
Autonomous co-operative machines for highly recongurable
assembly operations of the future AUTORECON (www.autorecon.eu) (Grant no. 285189). The authors would like to thank all
project partners for their valuable feedback on the discussed
approach.

References
[1] URL IFR, 2013, Available from: http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics.
[2] Michalos G, Makris S, Papakostas N, Mourtzis D, Chryssolouris G (2010)
Automotive Assembly Technologies Review: Challenges and Outlook for a
Flexible and Adaptive Approach. CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and
Technology 2:8191.
[3] Hu SJ, Ko J, Weyand L, ElMaraghy HA, Lien TK, Koren Y, Bley H, Chryssolouris G,
Nasr N, Shpitalni M (2011) Assembly System Design and Operations for
Product Variety. CIRP Annals Manufacturing Technology 60:715733.
[4] Paralikas J, Fysikopoulos A, Pandremenos J, Chryssolouris G (2011) Product
Modularity and Assembly Systems: An Automotive Case Study. CIRP Annals
Manufacturing Technology 60:165168.
[5] Reinhart G, Tekouo W (2009) Automatic Programming of Robot-Mounted 3D
Optical Scanning Devices to Easily Measure Parts in High-Variant Assembly.
CIRP Annals Manufacturing Technology 58:2528.
[6] Hamner B, Koterba S, Shi J, Simmons R, Singh S (2010) An Autonomous Mobile
Manipulator for Assembly Tasks. Autonomous Robots 28:131149.
[7] Hvilshoj M, Bogh S (2011) Little Helper An Autonomous Industrial Mobile
Manipulator Concept. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
8(2):8090.
[8] URL AUTORECON, 2013, Available from: http://www.autorecon.eu.
[9] Whitney DE (2004) Mechanical Assemblies: Their Design, Manufacture, and Role
in Product Development, Oxford Series on Advanced Manufacturing, Oxford
University Press, New York.
[10] Tomiyama T, Gu P, Jin Y, Lutters D, Kind C, Kimura F (2009) Design Methodologies: Industrial and Educational Applications. CIRP Annals Manufacturing
Technology 58:543565.
[11] Bgh S, Hvilshj M, Kristiansen M, Madsen O (2012) Identifying and Evaluating
Suitable Tasks for Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulators (AIMM). International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology 61:713726.
[12] Lepuschitz W, Zoitl A, Merdan M (2011) Ontology-Driven Automated Software
Conguration for Manufacturing System Components. 2011 IEEE International
Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 427433.
[13] Chryssolouris G (2006) Manufacturing Systems: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed.
Springer-Verlag, New York.
[14] URL: MoveIt!, 2009, Ioan A. Sucan and Sachin Chitta, MoveIt!, Available from:
http://moveit.ros.org.
[15] URL: ROS, 2013, Available from: http://www.ros.org.
[16] Morioka M, Sakakibara S (2010) A New Cell Production Assembly System with
HumanRobot Cooperation. CIRP Annals Manufacturing Technology 59:912.