Supervisory Control-Based Navigation Architecture: A New Framework for Autonomous Robots in Industry 4.0 Environments

Industry 4.0 is characterized by an increasing dependence on automation and interconnection of systems due to the need for more efficient, autonomous, and customizable processes, and so, mobile robot navigation becomes an important tool. In this paper, we present a general methodology for mobile robot navigation in industrial environments in which the open-loop behavior of the robot and the specifications are based on automata. We build a modular supervisor, which is the conjunction of two supervisors: the first one that enforces the robot to follow the path defined by a planner and the second one that guarantees the satisfaction of the specifications such as prevention of collisions and task and movement management. The proposed navigation architecture allows decentralized implementation, in which the modular supervisor is embedded in the mobile robot, whereas the planner runs in an external agent. Such a feature makes the adaptation of the proposed navigation architecture to different environments easy. The navigation architecture proposed in this paper is illustrated by means of a simulation in a hypothetical environment that resembles a smart factory.