A virtual laboratory of a manufacturing plant operated with mobile robots

Mobile robots are used in manufacturing workshops and storage plants to automate internal logistics. A model of a manufacturing plant which is representative of the forthcoming flexible systems is presented in this paper. It has been implemented in physical simulator V-Rep, with the KUKA youBot robot as the unit to perform material transportation and handling. This implementation has been used to create a virtual laboratory for students to learn about embedded robot controllers. Results show that the model is robust and that part of the system complexity must be transparent to users to focus on system design issues. Furthermore, the virtual laboratory has been used to explore some approaches to develop navigation control with minimal infrastructure support and other embedded software, which proves its validity as a research tool, too.