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8 CONCLUSIONS AND
OUTLOOK
In this paper we introduced an approach for automatic
planning of manufacturing processes to build prod-
ucts with robots. It bases on modules which aim for
integrating expert knowledge and at the same time
separate different domain expertises such as automa-
tion, process and application into independent com-
ponents. The approach contains a heuristic search
based on cost estimations to find a suitable manu-
facturing program. Here, the modules contribute to
different steps in order to solve the overall problem:
They allow for deriving a structural model from an
engineer’s construction plan of a goal product and are
used to calculate processes to establish the structure.
Furthermore, modules can plan concrete robot actions
to perform the overall manufacturing of the final prod-
uct. We applied the presented concept to the domain
of LEGO and used it to plan the manufacturing of a
LEGO house with a robot. It has been evaluated with
different variations of heuristic properties.
As further work, we plan to improve the perfor-
mance of the heuristic search, for example by re-
ducing the state space through geometric reachability
analysis between manipulator and object. Especially
when planning with multiple manipulators, a strategy
for the selection of alternative manipulators for each
process action might be included into the approach.
As a major future research question, we will inves-
tigate strategies for parallel execution of tasks using
independent manipulators. The goal is to make plan-
ning for multiple robots in a multi-functional robot
cell feasible without the rapidly growing planning
time seen in the multi-robot evaluation results of our
work. In a further step, a second use case in a differ-
ent domain – such as CFRP – will be investigated to
demonstrate that the presented concepts can be gener-
ically applied to other domains and in real world.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is partly funded by the German Research
Foundation (DFG) under the TeamBotS grant.
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