Manufacturing operations as services by robots with skills

Abstract This work considers flexible manufacturing operations based on reconfigurable robotic skills and their usage in fully automated service manufacturing. In agile and ultra-flexible manufacturing operations, where lot sizes go down to one, the setup and execution of new tasks must be instant. We extend service manufacturing towards applications of multi-purpose autonomous mobile robots. We take digital data and service-oriented approach to configure and utilize re-usable robot operations formulated as robot skills. We integrate service requests, and system and robot skill models for an easily executable manufacturing service system. We show the feasibility of our approach by experimental tests with merged indoor logistics, assembly, and finishing tasks.