Page - 28 - in Proceedings of the OAGM&ARW Joint Workshop - Vision, Automation and Robotics

the machine-to-machine communication has to be taken into account. IV. THE ROBWOOD CONCEPT The main task of the RobWood project is the development of several tools, which allow to combine each other in a very flexible and fast modifiable way. A. A Model driven Approach First of all, an overall controlling software, which is able to process and forward CAD-data, is needed. Within the RobWood project this software implementation has been named Manufacturing Execution System (MES). A data sink from this MES has to be a robot cell controller, which takes care of all the robot related information such as the actual position or the life cycle status of particular tools. The cell controller should actually serve as abstraction layer between the MES and the robot platform. As many different robots can be applied, every robot would need a customized cell controller in order to meet the interface requirements of the MES. Additionally, a Quality Inspection Unit (QIU) has been developed. This is a vision based unit and is responsible for controlling and ensuring the lasting quality of the workpieces. In order to achieve a high grade of flexibility and reusability of data, a cloud service for exchanging CAD- data with other companies and users is implemented. This unit is called Cloud Exchange Service (CES). B. The Production Workflow The combination and way of interaction of all parts involved in the RobWood project is visualized in figure 1, where all the gray shaded blocks indicate tools, which have been developed within the project. Fig. 1. Relations between the participating Units. At the beginning, the designer designs, layouts and an- alyzes the house. During his/her work in the CAD-system this design is broken down into automatically producible elements. After handing over the elements to the MES, they are nested with other elements if possible and handed over to the production process. The production process is a quite broad term, starting from laser applications to plot the elements, augmented reality applications, printing plans or barcodes over to the actual manufacturing of the product. In this phase it is possible to interact with other plants or the cloud services to optimize production (e.g. by producing similar elements with specific characteristic in a plant dedicated to these). When the elements are taken over to the production process they are forwarded to certain cell controllers specified to interact with an unique robot or machine. These cell controllers are placed on site and give detailed insights in the actual work in progress of the robot. Themainpurposeof thesecontrollers is toabstract the robots interface to the MES and give a more detailed insight for the user. The robot itself controls mechanical units needed to manufacture the product or to grant safety to the users. C. Domain Specific Language A Domain Specific Language (DSL) is a useful concept, which basically depicts a programming language that is created for a specific purpose. In other words, a DSL is a tool with limitedfocus,whichwefoundtobean idealopportunity for the RobWood project. Domain specific modeling is often used to describe concerns in robotics with concepts and notations to get closer to the respective problem domain and to raise the level of abstraction [8]. For the project we chose to implement a textual DSL instead of a graphical one as many frameworks are only available for the Java language runtime stack. A textual DSL also provides better integration to apply it in the future system which is based on the .NET language stack. The most relevant issue in our selection process is the integration of the DSL in the .NET language stack. Another point that we have considered is the integration in a future platform. For these reasons we have decided to choose an internal DSL because we are able to implement our approach inamoreaffordableway.Thiskindof languagefitsverywell for reactive systems, which are the systems that respond to external events, similar to robots. For all these aspects, the F# programming language was chosen to build our domain language. Fig. 2. Diagram of the Production. In figure 2 the whole production process is visualized as a sequence of several tasks described by the DSL. These particular tasks can again be described as a composition of more fine-grained tasks. Such an example of the pick up 28