Human-Robot Collaboration Based on Cyber-Physical Production System and MQTT

Abstract

A new trend in robotic cells is the Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in which robots and humans work together. Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will improve the flexibility of the future production systems in the newest smart factories. IEC-61499 is a standard based in Functions Blocks (FBs) that use reusable and modularised software to design industrial control systems. The use of FBs is suitable to implement CPPS. The proposal of this paper is to show architecture and implementation of a robot control system based on the IEC-61499 standard over the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol for HRC. An industrial robot based CPPS for HRC is decomposed into FBs to accomplish welding tasks. A study case is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system. Results show that the FB based CPPS for robot control possesses the potential capability for the welding process based on HRC.