A New Shopfloor Orchestration Approach for Collaborative Human-Robot Device Disassembly

Ioannis Chatzikonstantinou, Dimitrios Giakoumis, Dimitrios Tzovaras
2019 Zenodo  
We present a new approach to tackle the problem of task assignment and scheduling in human-robot teams that undertake collaborative device disassembly tasks. The proposed approach is a hybrid between a global search metaheuristic and an adaptive greedy operation assignment and scheduling algorithm. We propose the concept of an Adaptive (work)Cell, (aCell), which becomes the basis for the hierarchical organiza- tion of the proposed search approach. At high level, metaheuris- tic search
more » ... s resource constraints for each aCell and de- termines parameters for the task-level operation scheduling. At low level, the task-level scheduling algorithm produces feasible assignments and schedules within a single aCell by backtracking through feasible time slots using an adaptive score metric. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it clearly delineates between higher level state space exploration and focused, task- oriented exploitation. We validate the proposed approach on a class of novel multi-objective benchmark problems involving human-robot teams collaborating throughout a factory floor, addressing specifically for the first time the problem of device disassembly tasks, relevant to WEEE recycling, with additional constraints, where we obtain favorable results.
doi:10.5281/zenodo.3653704 fatcat:lgknnfrlvjeazgjpdzohdibw6i