Redundant Hybrid Robots for Resilience in Future Smart Factories

Due to the shortening of product life cycles, increased product variety and sinking product prices, it is of paramount importance for industries to deploy flexible and adaptive production solutions to increase their resilience. Robotic systems, which are capable of executing a broad range of tasks, play a crucial role in achieving such a resilience, and their application fields will expand even further. Particularly, mobile manipulators as a combination between mobile platforms and robotic arms ensure even greater flexibility with respect to robots which are not mounted over a mobile base due to their redundancy, which entails infinite possible ways to plan/execute a motion (kinematic redundancy), of integrating them in the industrial processes and of perceiving the surrounding environment (sensoric redundancy). In this paper such a redundancy is analyzed under a unified framework, where the mobile base is modeled with an equivalent serial kinematic structure and, consequently, the hybrid robot is considered as a serial redundant manipulator, named Redundant Hybrid Robot.