Transcript for:
Mobile Robotics Lecture Notes

Mobile Robotics well what is a mobile robot? Well  this is certainly one it's not the KUKA products   As far as I know KUKA has not been involved  in the development of this. But it has some   similarities. It has a manipulator it has a navigation system, it has autonomous driving.   So what we're talking about today has some  similarities with this robot.    And in the KUKA world when we talk about mobile robotics we  actually divide them into two product groups.    The first one is KMP KUKA Mobile Platforms and the  second one is KMR which are KUKA Mobile Robots. I got a question. The language here is in English obviously I hope that's okay.  We will do Swedish in the afternoon. If we continue to look at the KUKA Mobile Platform we have two different standard products It's the KMP 200 and the KMP 1500. And as the product name indicates. The 200 is for weights up to 200 kilos and the 1500s are for loads up to 1500 kilos.   Then in addition to this there are actually quite  large omnidrives which they are called which are   based built on project base application. And here  we can find products all the way from three tons load, up to several hundred tons actually but these  are built on project base on case by case.  But even though they share the same basic features as  the standard products.    On the other hand we have the KMR iiwa with  the iiwa robots mounted on the loads. And we have also here done some project based applications with the QUANTEC and the KMR KR 60 on Mobile Platforms. Regardless of this the KMR and the KMP have several common features. The first is the vehicle safety functions that means that, the mobile platform has laser scanners which covers the surrounding area,    around the vehicle. And it actually divides the safety area in two zones.  We have the yellow warning zone and if someone enters that zone the speed is reduced to safety's speed and then we have the safety field. If anyone enters that field, causes a complete safe stop of the units. Also on board are emergency stop buttons obviously. There are also audio signals and LED signals.   Which signals what status the vehicle is in and what it's about to do. There are of course batteries on board lithium-jon ion batteries and they can be charged, directly or with a floor contact. There are  two basic sets for the standard parts available right now.  Four or eight hours running time and obviously the charging time will follow that. And these batteries are dimensioned that it can do a complete full charging cycle five thousand times without deterioration. There is also the controller on board of course and this controller   controls the KMP and in the cases of KMR it  controls both the mobile platform and the robot itself. That means that you there is only one controller for both the platform and the robot and the navigation. And you can configure it all from one software one computer if you so like. The navigation system is what's called a SLAM and  navigation I will get back to you a little bit   more about this what this means. But it's a laser  scanner based navigation it's actually the same   laser scanners that are used for the safety fields. It also involves a fleet management.  And it's a very flexible very easy handling system let's see that shortly. Of course it's also possible to manually drive the KMP´s    Much like a radio controlled car and with that is a wireless controller. This is also used for the mapping of the area you need to place your KMP in. And for the KMR´s there is the standard product with the iiwa on board.  Which is also suitable for clean room application  for example. And on the KMP´s there are lifting  devices on board as well. If we need to manipulate the load. All of these KMP´s the vehicles themselves are  equipped with something called omniWheels   Which gives a very high flexibility and high  precision movements and some other features.   If you bear with me here I'm gonna make life easy  for myself and show you a video which explains the   features of the omniWwheel quite good. Be careful  I think the volume is quite high here so be warned. Okay I think that video describes the flexibility better than I can do in words of the omniWheel drive. I hope everyone saw the video okay. Some of you had some  problems if I understand it correctly. It gives us a very high flexibility compared to a  conventional maneuvering of a vehicle for example   if you want to have a vehicle in this example  which moves from corner to corner in a tight area. If you just have a conventional steering you would  do a movement something similar to this.   While with the omniDrive you can just go diagonally like this and also the turning radius will be much much lower If we have a tricycle driving it will take here.   But where the omniWheel we can really turn on  a dime as it's called on a very tight spots. And it also gives us the flexibility that we don't really have to consider a turning radius of the vehicle, when we plan the layout of our production . So we can actually do a lot of space saving when using this technology. So this gives us a really really high flexibility when using these type of drives. Now when it comes to navigation, manual operations is possible but typically there  are several solutions for guiding autonomous  vehicles it could be inductive guidance, or optical guidance with rotating lasers and mirrors magnetic  grids is common. Rotating lasers I mentioned with reflectors,  and indoor GPS's. All these technologies require that we are we have to do something in our production environment, set up reflectors or have an indoor GPS coverage or place a magnetic grid. In our case we have used what we call a SLAM navigation. Which is also described best with a small video. You see my screen now I think So in the first step we manually make the map by driving around the cars or the vehicle in the environment. We then tell the vehicle where in this map it  is by placing it into the map basically by click on the map. We define how to get from various locations or if you like we   create the paths from going from A to B for example. And we also provide these paths with   different parameters that speed limitations etc  or road signs if you like what to look out for.   So this is basically how we set up the navigation this which is actually quite fun to do. Now this seems obviously very simple, but by doing  this we are not really completely finished. Now the vehicles can navigate and they know the roads but they also need   a command often from a higher system to tell to give them missions to carry out. And this is done with a fleet management system in the vehicle. Which we  an have either a central fleet manager  or directly in the vehicle if we like.   Which then communicates with a PLC or a  higher level system ERP system or MES system.   And this then orders our vehicles with the different tasks that are demanded from this.   And there is a predefined interface for higher level system which connects to our fleet manager system here.  And this are some screenshots of how it in real time looks like. And this can also be cloud connected so we can remotely monitor our fleet manager if we like. That pretty much covers this, I have shown you a few youtube videos. And I like to show you one more of truck essambly. I think this was quite a nice installation from our point of view   I've shown you quite a few videos there are  a ton of more videos on these applications   This is just a small picking from them. This is a picture from our TechCenter in Augsburg but in fact we have at our   TechCenter here in Gothenburg both the KMR iiwa  and the KMP 1500 and the 200 as well.  So anyone who is curious or of course welcome  here to try it out and have a look at yourself   We can also arrange events at your site if possible. Where you can invite your customers and have a demonstration of this.  Please don't hesitate to get in contact with us  this was basically all from us today. I hope you find this fruitful and interesting.