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

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new RoboCup Smart Manufacturing League to better reflect modern factory challenges, integrating logistics, robotics, and human collaboration to enhance relevance and attract diverse participants.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive competition framework that expands beyond logistics to include assembly, human-robot interaction, and robotics, aligning with current industrial manufacturing trends.

Findings

New league design covers broader manufacturing challenges.

Integration of multiple tracks into a unified scenario.

Aims to increase competition relevance and participant diversity.

Abstract

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.