FESTO Mobile Robot for Collaboration Between Industrial Workstations

Ecuador’s economy heavily relies on raw material exports, which has led to limited interest in technological innovation and automation. However, this project serves as a catalyst for change. Its primary goal is to inspire both established and emerging enterprises to reevaluate their industrial processes, with a strong focus on adopting the latest Industry 4.0 advancements. A pivotal aspect of this initiative involves deploying an autonomous mobile robot equipped with artificial vision. This cutting-edge technology not only detects and alerts obstacles but also demonstrates its ability to navigate around them, highlighting the transformative potential of Industry 4.0 in Ecuador. Industry 4.0 encompasses the integration of digital technologies such as IoT, AI, and automation into manufacturing processes, enhancing efficiency, productivity, and adaptability in today’s industrial landscape. Thus, the goal is to adapt the capabilities to perform collaborative autonomous tasks in workstations and ensure safety in the application environment. The omnidirectional line-following robot can optimally evade different obstacles by synchronizing sensors and a webcam controlled by an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX card that allows the provisioning and execution of deep learning models. This is an evasion algorithm with real-time communication dynamics to visualize what the robot detects and establish a timeline of the ac- tions performed. Through experimental tests in an environment that emulates collaborative work between two production stations, A and B, 80.4% effectiveness in detection predictions and 91.33% in successful evasions were obtained.