RoboCup@Work
Intra logistics in the Smart Factory: Building the RoboCup@Work TeamShort Facts
- Duration: 01 Feb. 2020 to 31 Jan. 2021
- Funded by: Hans-Wilhelm Renkhoff Foundation
Summary
For more than 20 years, RoboCup has proven itself as an international competition to decisively develop competences in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence with a high public profile. The @Work League aims to solve robot-related problems in an Industry 4.0 and Smart Factory environment and to demonstrate this in a testing environment. This subject matter is especially relevant for regional and cross-regional businesses and thus an important component of the THWS research focus “Digital Manufacturing”.
Project goals and contents
Robotics plays an essential and extremely versatile role in a smart factory. In addition to production, handling and assembly activities, robots are taking on more and more intralogistics tasks in the modern factory. Components and tools must be transported between different work stations in a timely manner. To do this, the so-called automated guided vehicles (AGVs) must be able to navigate safely in highly dynamic environments, identify objects in the environment and pick them up if necessary. Additionally, the logistics processes must be efficiently planned and optimised and interact with the workflows at the processing stations to ensure a productive manufacturing chain.
The RoboCup@Work league was founded in 2013 to enable the scientific investigation of these diverse and sometimes complex research questions. This international competition is about developing robots that can autonomously perform transport and handling tasks in an abstracted industrial environment. The popular RoboCup competition, which now has five main leagues, has proven itself since 1997 as a platform for advancing the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence at universities and schools and making it accessible to the general public.
The aim of the project is to establish a RoboCup@Work team at THWS, which addresses several strategic goals of the higher education institution in the areas of research, teaching and public relations and promotes co-operation with the business community.