From Production Logistics to Smart Manufacturing: The Vision for a New RoboCup Industrial League

The RoboCup Logistics League is a RoboCup competition in a smart factory scenario that has focused on task planning, job scheduling, and multi-agent coordination. The focus on production logistics allowed teams to develop highly competitive strategies, but also meant that some recent developments in the context of smart manufacturing are not reflected in the competition, weakening its relevance over the years. In this paper, we describe the vision for the RoboCup Smart Manufacturing League, a new competition designed as a larger smart manufacturing scenario, reflecting all the major aspects of a modern factory. It will consist of several tracks that are initially independent but gradually combined into one smart manufacturing scenario. The new tracks will cover industrial robotics challenges such as assembly, human-robot collaboration, and humanoid robotics, but also retain a focus on production logistics. We expect the reenvisioned competition to be more attractive to newcomers and well-tried teams, while also shifting the focus to current and future challenges of industrial robotics.

A ROS~2-based Navigation and Simulation Stack for the Robotino

The Robotino, developed by Festo Didactic, serves as a versatile platform in education and research for mobile robotics tasks. However, there currently is no ROS2 integration for the Robotino available. In this paper, we describe our work on a Webots simulation environment for a Robotino platform extended by LIDAR sensors. A ROS2 integration and a pre-configured setup for localization and navigation using existing ROS packages from the Nav2 suite are provided. We validate our setup by comparing simulations with real-world experiments conducted by three Robotinos in a logistics environment in our lab. Additionally, we tested the setup using a ROS 2 hardware driver for the Robotino developed by team GRIPS of the RoboCup Logistics League. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using ROS2 and Nav2 for navigation tasks on the Robotino platform showing great consistency between simulation and real-world performance.