Development Update: FH OOE Demonstrator

Within the FELICE project, besides the main showcase at CRF in Melfi, a second alternative showcase is in use. This demonstrator is developed at the R&D department of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. The goal of this second demonstrator is to prove the versatility and ease of use of the FELICE framework and to test various components in an additional environment. The basic components of the demonstrator are the same as for CRF: FIWARE as the central communication protocol, the Orchestrator for planning, executing and analyzing workflows, and a database for recording various test runs. Fundamentally, all FIWARE entity definitions were also adopted to keep the second demonstrator as close as possible to the main showcase. Furthermore, a MiR100 as a mobile platform, a UR10 as a collaborative robot, a work table with equipped worker assistance systems, a stereo camera system for the detection and evaluation of worker posture/ergonomics, as well as a speech input/output system are used in the demonstrator. Although these components differ in a natural way from the setup in CRF, the same interfaces have been implemented which allow the underlying hardware to be fully abstracted and interchangeable. This enables the execution of workflows both in CRF and at the campus Wels without having to make any changes to workflows. This infrastructure provides us with the ability to test new workflows and iterate more quickly on changes without having to rely on the setup in CRF. In addition, the Orchestrator software is deployed as Docker containers using remote deployment pipelines equally in both CRF and Wels. This helps us to validate the software and also to detect errors at an early stage before they can emerge in CRF during major integration activities.