Optimizing robot teamwork for manufacturing

Stanford researchers have developed an innovative algorithm that improves the manufacturing assembly process by effectively organizing autonomous robots.

Developments in autonomous robotics have the potential to revolutionize manufacturing processes, making them more flexible, customizable, and efficient. But coordinating fleets of autonomous, mobile robots in a shared space – and helping them work with each other and with human partners – is an extremely complicated task.

Researchers at Stanford have created an algorithm that can take a design plan for a particular product and figure out the most efficient way to manufacture it with a team of robots. Their work, published recently in the journal Robotics and Autonomous Systems, includes planning how to construct subassemblies that are built separately and then combined, such as constructing a car door and then attaching it to the body; directing the robots to work both alone and in teams; and laying out the assembly floor in an efficient manner that prevents collisions.

Mac Schwager, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford, and SRC faculty member, co-authored the paper. “There has been research into some of these individual pieces, but I think we’re the first to really think about how it all fits together into a large-scale system.”

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