Localization and navigation of an omnidirectional mobile robot: the robot@factory case study

The Robot@Factory competition was recently included in Robotica, the main Portuguese Robotics Competition. This robot competition takes place in an emulated factory plant, where Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) must cooperate to perform tasks. To accomplish their goals, the AGVs must deal with localization, navigation, scheduling and cooperation problems that must be solved autonomously. This robot competition can play an important role in education due to its inherent multidisciplinary approach, which can motivate students to bridge different technological areas. It can also play an important role in research and development, because it is expected that its outcomes will later be transferred to real-world problems in manufacturing or service robots. By presenting a scaled-down factory shop floor, this competition creates a benchmark that can be used to compare different approaches to the challenges that arise in this kind of environments. The ability to alter the environment, in some restricted areas, can usually promote the test and evaluation of different localization mechanisms, which is not possible in other competitions. This paper presents one of the possible approaches to build a robot capable of entering this competition. It can be used as a reference to current and new teams.