project plan project #34 flexible factory floor with

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Aalto University

ELEC-E8004 Project work course

Year 2018

Project plan

Project #34

Flexible Factory Floor with Mobile Robots and Wireless Communication

Date: 27.1.2018

Kiril Cheremetiev

Ali Muhammad

Taavi Oksanen

Antti Tenhunen

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Information page Students

Kiril Cheremetiev

Ali Muhammad

Taavi Oksanen

Antti Tenhunen

Project manager

Ali Muhammad

Official Instructor

Udayanto Dwi Atmojo

Other advisors

Valeriy Vyatkin

Gulzar Kashif

Starting date

4.1.2018

Approval

The Instructor has accepted the final version of this document

Date: 29.1.2017

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1) Background

In this project, we are working with EnAS demonstrator [1] and implementing our own, independ-

ent Mobile Work Unit (MWU). The EnAS demonstrator is an assembly line developed by Martin

Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and Festo Didactic. The assembly line consists of six inde-

pendent conveyor lines forming a circuit and two identical plant modules rotated by 180° to each

other illustrated in web-article [1]. The EnAS demonstrator includes a total of two gripper stations,

two jack stations associated with gripper stations and three product palettes. The jack stations can

be used as a buffer.

The previous project groups introduced flexibility of the control system by featuring on the fly up-

dating of control units and the controllers were upgraded by NxtDCSmini controllers for distributed

systems [2]. The project group of 2017 [3] included computer vision to detect certain scenarios with

color recognition and parallel simulation with EnAS. The same group demonstrated fault tolerance

in manufacturing through the capability in maintaining production process in case one up to three

hardware controllers fail.

The aim of this project is to demonstrate next generation manufacturing paradigm with flexibility

and modularity through self-organization of smart machines. The units will be cellular and support

parallel configuration to contribute the model of net-centric and customizable production

2) Expected output

This project will demonstrate flexibility and modularity of modern production systems by utilizing

the potential of state of the art technologies to introduce certain degree of intelligence and collabo-

ration of machines. This collaboration of machines aims at prototyping customizable product as-

sembly, which often implies physical reconfiguration of production machinery and software rede-

sign. The aim of this project is to propose a manufacturing paradigm better suited to near future

requirements to quickly respond to fluctuations such as product customizations, failures or changes

in market demand.

The expected output of the project is to provide fully digitalized factory floor composed of peer-to-

peer, wirelessly communicating and collaborating machines. These machines form a customizable

assembly line by utilizing production units (cells) as basic mechatronic blocks in the assembly pro-

cess. These cells will be equipped with sensors and actuators and shall be transportable by automat-

ed guided vehicles (AGVs).

The modularity of the assembly line will be demonstrated in certain dynamic/reconfiguration sce-

narios (e.g., manufacturing operations provided by the mobile working unit that takes over the tasks

of certain manufacturing units which experience failures, mobile working unit that docks to the as-

sembly line and perform additional manufacturing operations in response to product requirements

from customer).

The expected user could be any modern manufacturing industry such as car manufacturers. The

demonstrated scenario will be a simplified example of manufacturing process, which can be imple-

mented to be a part of a more complex assembly process.

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Figure 1. Draft of MWU

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3) Phases of project The project is divided into seven main phases defined as milestones. Each milestone is divided into

smaller subtasks specified in work packages, which state the tasks needed to perform to complete

certain milestone. Deadlines are directional as delays might occur for example with product orders.

1. Initialization (4.1.-29.1.)

The first milestone of the project is initialization. The initialization includes the first meeting with

the project group and the advisors as well as brainstorming ideas for the project. At the end of the

initialization everybody should have a rough idea about the aim of the project and following objec-

tives.

2. Conceptualization (8.1. - 6.3.)

During conceptualization the main target is the planning of project through training and research by

learning from previous projects as well as defining the output of the project. This includes brain-

storming with group and planning for own implementations and equipment needed for the project.

Business planning is taken in account as it is important part of the project.

3. Prototyping (14.1.-28.2.)

Prototyping is the phase of the project, which comprises familiarizing with software such as Visual

Components and nxtSTUDIO. The aim is to create different product scenarios and evaluate the

product by performing simulations and assembling prototypes. The outcome of prototyping is prod-

uct design used for implementation.

4. EnAS (5.1.-16.4.)

The objective of the fourth milestone is getting familiar with EnAS as a platform and developing

own program. This includes mechanical and electrical modifications of the platform such as remov-

ing unnecessary modifications of other groups and designing fresh solutions. Testing and simulation

is also crucial.

5. MWU (19.1.-23.4.)

Designing and building of MWU is one of the key milestones of the project. The plan is to first

build a platform with a gripper and conveyor line for handling parts and integrate for example a

360-degree rotating web camera for vision sensing of products and navigation. Before acquiring

AGV, moving of the platform may be done by hand. Like EnAS, implementing MWU requires me-

chanical and electrical design as well as programming and testing.

6. Integration (26.3.-4.5.)

Integration involves the intercommunicating between EnAS and MWU. This includes getting famil-

iar with AGV and implementing docking system between EnAS and MWU. There should be a fea-

ture, which allows the AGV to detach from the MWU to be able to move multiple platforms by

only using a single AGV. The communication between platforms will be wireless.

7. Delivery (1.5.-31.5.)

Delivery contains everything that need to be presented during the project. These include final gala,

presentations, documentation and final report.

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4) Work breakdown structure (WBS)

Figure 2. Work Breakdown Structure

5) Work packages and Tasks of the project and Schedule Work packages and corresponding tasks are defined in Figure 3. Detailed schedule is presented in

Appendix A (Figure 4). It is in the form of Gantt chart and includes list of tasks with estimated

work hours and approximated start dates and end dates.

Figure 3. Work Packages and Tasks

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5.1) Description of work packages

WP1. Project Management

Management duties include work scheduling and coordinating between members of the team and

instructors. Project manager also takes care that work facilities are available for team members.

WP2. Project Planning

The work package includes tasks such brainstorming, conceptualizing and product definition. Tasks

in this work package include the whole team and should be done collectively. Writing the project

plan is part of this package.

WP3. Business Planning

The work package includes competitor analysis and exploring business aspects for the project. Also,

this package should be done including all the members. Writing the business plan and creating

presentation for the seminar lecture is part of this package.

WP4. Prototype

The work package includes training for Visual Components and other tools needed for prototyping.

One task is to design scenarios for EnAS and MWU based on product definition and explored busi-

ness aspects. Simulation of these design scenarios are also part of the package.

WP5. EnAS

The work package includes tasks like learning about the hardware and control software on EnAS.

Other tasks are to do mechanical and electrical design based on earlier design scenarios. Testing is

also required for this package.

WP6. MWU

Implementing MWU will be one of the most demanding work packages of project. The work pack-

age includes electrical and mechanical design of MWU as well as ordering the parts and program-

ming PLCs. Vision-based sensing will be implemented based on the work of the previous related

projects.

WP7. Integration

Integration unites EnAS and MWU. The goal is to design docking and intercommunication between

the devices. Learning to use AGV will be part of integration as it will move the MWU platform and

needs to be programmed.

WP8. Delivery

Writing the final report and final gala are included in delivery. This includes also the preparations

for presentation.

WP9. Project Documentation

Project documentation includes keeping the minutes of meeting up to date and reporting progres-

sion. General documentation contains the documentation of hardware including new changes.

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6) Work resources Table 1. Number of hours available for the project (excluding lectures and seminars) per week.

Kiril Cheremetiev Ali Muhammad Taavi Oksanen Antti Tenhunen

Week 1 4 6 6 6

Week 2 3 6 4 6

Week 3 10 10 11 10

Week 4 16 15 16 10

Week 5 16 12 14 10

Week 6 8 12 16 15

Week 7 6 6 0 15

Week 8 16 16 16 15

Week 9 16 16 16 15

Week 10 16 16 16 15

Week 11 16 14 16 15

Week 12 10 14 16 0

Week 13 16 8 16 13

Week 14 10 6 0 15

Week 15 16 16 16 15

Week 16 16 16 16 15

Week 17 16 16 16 15

Week 18 16 16 16 15

Week 19 10 16 16 15

Week 20 12 16 16 15

Week 21 16 16 6 15

Total 265 271 265 265

7) Cost plan and materials

The major modules that the team will be working on include EnAS demonstrator and MWU. Dur-

ing the first phase of the project, team was able to run the 2016 project on EnAS demonstrator suc-

cessfully; therefore, it is safe to assume that no major cost pertaining to EnAS demonstrator will be

incurred. Nevertheless, to modify EnAS according to our project scenarios, a few electrical and

mechanical modifications will be required. But again, we are not expecting any expense during

hardware modifications since necessary mechanical modules can be developed from scratch at Aal-

to workshop.

For the MWU, consisting of mobile platform on AGV, electrical gripper and conveyor, the expen-

sive equipment will be procured using alternative budget sources (research group). For AGV, a

meeting has been arranged with Omron on 13th Feb 2018, where a demo will be presented by the

vendor on LD Omron. After discussion with the vendor, a final decision will be taken by the in-

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structors on AGV. But at this phase of the project, it is unclear whether an AGV will be procured or

borrowed from the vendor.

Components that support functional requirements of mobile working unit e.g., batteries, sensors,

cameras, etc., will be purchased from the project budget. Although at the moment, it is difficult to

exactly specify the components along with vendor and price description, we have listed down parts,

quantity and estimated price in Table 2. Please note that for some perishable parts, extra copies have

been mentioned since procurement process can take a few weeks.

For software part, Visual Components was the major module whose license was to be purchased

and fortunately, licenses for Visual Components for all project members have already been acquired

by the advisor.

Lastly, given the dynamic nature of the project, some miscellaneous items might be bought for the

specific purposes. These items will be added and updated in the cost plan as the project proceeds. It

is expected that the total budget will not exceed 10,000 EUR.

Table 2. Cost plan and materials

Component Quantity Price per unit

Schunk EGP (gripper) / Festo HGPLE (gripper) 1 700 / 3000

Festo Didactic conveyor 2 1000

Festo SLTE (slide) 3 1400

Battery 24 V 4 350

Raspberry PI 2 100

IMU 1 50

Camera 2 100

Festo optical sensors 4 100

Extra 24 V motors 3 100

Miscellaneous To be decided

Estimated total cost 10,000 EUR

8) Other resources

One of the major modules during the project require working on EnAS demonstrator. Since, two

groups (2016 and 2017) have worked previously on the EnAS, therefore project group has abundant

help available in terms of extensive documentation and NxtStudio programming. Moreover, color

detection function using camera was also obtained by 2017 group, so we can also modify the color

detection algorithm according to our project requirements.

Currently, the project group has requested access (key cards) for TUAS building and the EnAS de-

monstrator lab, where previous groups have also worked before. There is a PC available in the lab,

which will mostly be used for the project purposes. We are also planning to make use of some of

the facilities in the university premises (e.g., the Mechatronics Learning Environment, Aalto Indus-

trial Internet Campus, Aalto workshop) to work on the project. Group is hopeful that certain facility

will be acquired and utilized effectively down the road for the project.

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At the moment, more permanent access rights are being acquired from the relevant department so

the team members can access the laboratory at will and outside working days/hours. Any request

that is raised to Timo Oksanen is first routed through project instructor and advisors for justification

and approval. The same approach will be continued for any future permission requests.

9) Project management and responsibilities

9.1) Project Manager

For every successful project, the role of project manager is quite pivotal. Having a good project

manager in a group helps to achieve goals smoothly and in an efficient way. For the course of this

project, Muhammad Ali will handle the responsibilities as the group manager. He is responsible for

communication, collaboration, coordination and facilitation of group members with project instruc-

tor and advisors and with any external staff/entity concerned with the group project. His tasks in-

clude acting as the main contact person of the group, keeping record of minutes of meeting of week-

ly meetings, facilitating in getting access to working labs or keys etc., taking responsibility of the

project modules deadlines and raising any issues (if necessary) to advisors or instructor in case of

any predicament. The project manager also follows the progress of the project and tries to

maintain an overall picture of the project from the beginning to the end.

9.2) Instructor and Advisors

The project is being carried out under the supervision and guidance of Postdoctoral Fellow, PhD

Udayanto Dwi Atmojo and two advisors, Prof Valeriy Vyatkin and Kashif Gulzar. Atmojo, being a

researcher in the field of industrial automation, provides guidelines, inculcates necessary technical

information and leads the vision of the project. He provides feedback on team progress particularly

on weekly meetings and generally on digital channels (Google Docs and email). He also provides

requirements and constraints about the project that must be considered and acts as the main coordi-

nator in case of any issues during the project such as budget constraints or procurement problems.

Project advisors act as the council committee and remain in close collaboration with the group and

facilitate during all phases of the project in any technical or non-technical aspect of the deliverables.

9.3) Work Package Leaders

The group has collectively decided not to nominate any work package leaders during this phase of

project. As the project proceeds, different members of the group will take lead on different work

package according to time availability, technical grasp of area under study and interest of the indi-

vidual members.

10) Project Meetings

During the planning phase of the project, meetings have been conducted more frequently with in-

structor and advisors to understand the scope of the project. During meetings, we discuss work done

on EnAS by previous groups and come up with new ideas for the product definition keeping in re-

gards the prime requirements of flexibility and reconfigurability of the automated manufacturing

and assembly process.

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As the project is entering prototyping and implementation phase, the agenda has been modified to

conduct meetings once a week with instructor and advisors. The agenda of the weekly meetings is

to discuss the progress on the project, highlight any challenges or help required and making sure

that the project progress is well aligned with the overall outcome of the project. Moreover, mile-

stones for the next week are also set during the meetings. Project manager takes notes of the memos

of the meetings and publishes these memos in a “minutes of meetings”-log book in Google Doc for

record keeping. The structure of these memos usually contains the purpose of the meeting and gen-

eral discussion, highlighted challenges by the group members and viable solutions provided by the

instructor/advisors and action points on the group members before the next meeting. Therefore,

apart from just record keeping, memos help to quantify the weekly progress before the next meet-

ing. At the end of the meeting, time slot for next weekly meeting is discussed and as per the availa-

bility of project members and advisors, next meeting slot is booked. Apart from the weekly meet-

ings, occasional meetings are also called upon as per the request of the members of the project and

availability of the advisors. In these meetings, members usually request for some technical or non-

technical help or guidance required. These meetings are usually more informal in nature as compare

to weekly meetings. Memos of these meetings are also updated in the log book.

Lastly, since the meeting room is booked for limited amount of time (usually an hour), each ex-

pected participant of the meeting is required to be in the meeting room at designated time. Such a

practice helps to avoid unnecessary waste of time and disturbance. Until now, all participants have

shown conformity to time adherence and hopefully, the practice will continue until the completion

of the project.

11) Communication plan

For internal communication among project members, Telegram and Google Drive is being used.

For external communication of group members with instructor and advisors, email and Google

Drive is being used. Google Drive is used as a common workspace and all the documents are main-

tained there. Telegram is used for rapid communication among the members, to ask other’s opinions

and inform about meetings. For official and essential information, email is used. Internal group

meetings are planned on ad hoc basis, usually once or twice a week. These meetings help to coordi-

nate better in person, review the current situation of the project and discuss weekly progress or any

new challenges. Project meetings with the instructor have already been discussed in detail in section

10.

12) Risks

Main risks during the project will lie in underestimating required resources and not foreseeing

challenges that will be part of the implementation phase. Special care should be taken with such

tasks, which future tasks will depend on. Fortunately, due to the nature of the project, many of the

tasks can be done in parallel. In most cases, if individual task gets delayed, it is not going to hinder

other tasks from being completed. Because of the uncertainty, due to initial lack of knowledge and

skills when designing and building new kind of system, work hours should be overestimated to

count in all unseen problems.

One concern is that there is dependency on multiple different product suppliers to build the actual

system. If there is a critical part that gets delayed on delivery or not enough research is done to en-

sure its compatibility with rest of the system, major workload issues might arise later on the road.

Enough research should be done on the parts to ensure that they are compatible both in software and

hardware level. Also, ideally it would be good to know how fast replacements or alternative parts

can be delivered. Technical failures should be also considered, especially when software is con-

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cerned. Backups should be kept making sure that the work hours used to create the program will not

be lost.

Since the project definition is quite open and the main themes to follow are topics like flexibility

and reconfigurability, many approaches could be taken. Therefore, it is important to have effective

communication with the instructor and the advisors to ensure that nothing critical is being misun-

derstood. Also, the plans outside of this project should be taken in consideration to have a desirable

outcome.

Project manager will be overseeing that team will have the needed facilities to use when required.

Team members are responsible to bring up any issues related to their workload and skills on specif-

ic task as early as possible. This way project manager will be able to do necessary workload ad-

justments and rescheduling.

13) Quality plan

After the team has come up with expected outcome of the project and definition of what is being

built, there will be discussion about minimum requirements, which need to be fulfilled to consider

the project successful. Project manager and other team members will be observing quality as the

project goes on and are responsible to bring up ideas related to improving the quality of work. Team

will discuss quality concepts related to design and documentation to ensure that standards and good

practices are being followed. As the project progresses, instructors and the team will discuss any

concerns or ideas related to quality during the project meetings.

The project manager will oversee that people with appropriate skills and interests are assigned to

each work packages and workload is being distributed evenly. Team members are responsible in

keeping project manager up to date what has been done. This will help the project manager to spot

if people assigned to specific work packages are too overloaded that the quality of work is being

degraded. In case of problems, team will sit down together to discuss the problems and try to come

up with solutions, which in turn will be approved with instructors as needed.

14) Changing this plan

Because of complexity of our project, there might come time when some parts of this plan needs

corrected or changed. Therefore, in this section we will present a step-by-step procedure how

changing the plan is performed:

• The initiative for changing the plan can come from anyone within the task group. However,

it is the task leader who is responsible for compiling a document based on proposed chang-

es. The document should explain the proposed change, advantages and risks of proposal, and

how it will affect the schedule.

• The document is forwarded to the project manager, who will check that proposal is feasible

to achieve and it will not hamper the progress of other tasks. If changing the plan is possible,

the project manager will arrange meeting with instructors and other project members, where

the proposal is discussed and finalized. Otherwise, the project manager will send the pro-

posal back for revision.

• Finally, the document can be modified and sent to instructors for the final approval. All

changes to the project plan are documented in revision history.

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15) Measures for successful project

The project is considered successful, if we can demonstrate a flexible product assembly using EnAS

and MWU(s). The requirement for this is to design, simulate and build a reconfigurable production

scenario. Each of these steps are successful, if time constraints and goals presented in the project

plan are met. Because the project is expected to contribute to the CELL creation, documentation

should be prepared with extra care.

Both software and hardware play as key roles in the project. Implementation at the software part is

evaluated with unit tests, which are self-confined test scenarios for each module. These test scenari-

os can be used to check if, for example, state machines and exception handling are implemented

correctly and according to specifications. In case of hardware, wirings and connections are verified

through documentations and datasheets. Hardware is also tested alongside with software during unit

testing.

Documentation and cooperation are essential in project process evaluation. Team members will

note down their weekly progress and work hours into ledger. Project manager will verify that the

quality and correctness of work done is according to project plan and is on time with schedule.

16) References 1. EnAS Demonstrator (n.d.) Available from http://aut.informatik.uni-

halle.de/forschung/enas_demo/ [Accessed on 27 January 2018]

2. Wireless and Distributed Automation System with Smart Update (n.d.) Available from

https://wiki.aalto.fi/display/AEEproject/Wireless+and+Distributed+Automation+System+with+Sma

rt+Update [Accessed on 28 January 2018]

3. Flexible assembly line with robustness in IEC-61499 standard (n.d.) Available from

https://wiki.aalto.fi/display/AEEproject/Flexible+assembly+line+with+robustness+in+IEC-

61499+standard [Accessed on 27 January 2018]

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A) Appendix

Figure 4. Schedule

project plan project #34 flexible factory floor with

Documents