Maintenance and Telematics for Robots (MainTelRob)

This paper informs about a current challenge in industrial research and our first approaches to address this topic. Industrial robots are shipped to facilities all over the world and the manufacturers' engineers often need to travel far to fix errors. To reduce downtimes and costs, plant manufacturers need easy to use and comprehensive telemaintenance services to support repair and maintenance tasks at remote facilities. We explain the requirements for such a novel remote maintenance system and the exemplary workflows we and our industrial partners aim to improve. We give a short survey of the state of the art in the fields of networked-control and augmented reality, followed by a description of our own ideas for adaptive control over networks and improved situation awareness. Subsequently, we present our first system designs and the testbed we created to verify our approaches during further development.