Decentralized Robot-Cloud Architecture for an Autonomous Transportation System in a Smart Factory

The aim of this paper is to present a decentralized control architecture for an autonomous transportation system in the manufacturing facility of the future. Each component in the factory (machine, robot, operator...) is represented as an individual agent on the cloud and makes autonomous decisions based on the information exchanged with other agents. Production machines control their own material replenishment by contracting the services of Autonomous Transportation Vehicles (ATV) over the cloud. Moreover, two control panels for human synergy on strategical and operational layers for monitoring and interacting with the system have been provided. Based on new trends on the industry 4.0 revolution, this paper develops an intelligent communication architecture between machines, robots and humans. This novel architecture makes the system robust, flexible and scalable. The requirements for such an architecture have been first defined and then validated via a series of theoretical cases and two experiments where communication and hardware failures have