Robot Operations Framework

Robotic systems are optimized to solve a specific task perfectly and automated. However, you will mostly need a diverse mix of different tasks like transporting things, storing items, picking, sorting and many more. As you won‘t find robotic systems doing all of this with one machine, you will need handovers and interfaces between different robot systems (also as software) and of course the manual process parts.

Adding those handovers start with adaptations to your shop floor environment as you need to create well defined stations, locations or even specific hardware. Keeping the real world situation (where items are positioned) in sync with the digital twin which robots need to work with, is important to prevent errors.

Next to hardware and environmental changes, you need to clearly define communication interfaces. For technical systems to talk to each other, the interfaces are mostly defined and documented and need to be connected by IT engineers.

Layers like WAKU Sense make this part way easier as your engineers just need to talk to one system and WAKU uses the multiple different interfaces to all the robots.
More critical is the communication between people and robots. They want to notify each other about new tasks, status of work, errors or even ask for help. This requires an easy to use software interface which allows people to simply interact with the robot but also allow robots to proactively communicate back to the people.