Flexible Multi-Agent System for Distributed Coordination, Transportation & Localisation

This demonstration presents Flexonomy, a flexible autonomous system for distributed coordination, transportation and localisation in a lab-scale factory floor. It illustrates the use of multi-agent systems in manufacturing and leverages new Industry 4.0 design principles to cope with manufacturing requirements in factories of the future: rapidly changing customer needs, market volatility and shortened product life cycles. Three main contributions are identified: (i) distributed auction-based coordination allows local decision making and task allocation, (ii) distributed model predictive control-based transportation enables free space collision avoidance of automated guided vehicles (AGVs), and (iii) distributed vision-based localisation provides scalable and dynamic position information of key resources on the factory floor.