# TalkRoBots: A Middleware for Robotic Systems in Industry 4.0 +
## 1 Introduction  
The concept of Industry 4.0 is currently changing both the manner in which manufacturing systems as well as production business models have been thought of [1]. Smart Factories, which are a key feature of Industry 4.0, can be built to manufacture \"Smart Products\" with more flexibility. They are composed of several inter-connected advanced devices, including networked sensors, conveyor, robots or Cloud servers. Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) are increasingly studied due to the evolving nature of industrial requirements. Hence, there is an emerging interest to consider cooperation between several heterogeneous robots evolving in ubiquitous environments [2]. These robots are not only limited to classical industrial ones, but they are increasingly including co-bots, Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs), drones, etc. In fact, mobile robots enable, by essence, the enlargement of the scope of reactive behaviors in the dynamic products' routing since they navigate freely in the production floor or in the warehouse [3]. Moreover, this free guidance brings a higher level of manufacturing flexibility. As an example, commercial AGVs such as Kuka LMR IIWA can receive task orders from real-time production systems and manufacture execution systems. Moreover, the technological evolution in mechatronics, computer engineering and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) allows the deployment of flexible manufacturing applications including a fleet of heterogeneous robots that share databetween them, with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices and Cloud servers [4]. These heterogeneous robots are not de facto easily interoperable since they are built by different manufacturers supporting various programming frameworks, which are not standardized. A fleet of heterogeneous AGVs, such as as KMP omniMove, Ridgeback and AGV MIR can, for instance, cooperate together to transport big products. Note also that a new generation of mobile robots is currently developed for warehouses to reduce travel time, improve safety or increase productivity. The implementation of cooperative tasks involving heterogeneous robots in FMS or warehouse needs, however, to consider several communication and interoperability aspects for a powerful and cost-efficient operation of plants. Due to the increase in system complexity and intelligence, there is a growing need for transparent communication and data sharing between multi-robot systems, IIoT devices and the human operators who supervise the production tasks, especially in the case of resilient flexible manufacturing scenarios. Therefore, the design of a new middleware allowing a transparent communication between heterogeneous devices and an easy dynamical tasks' scheduling becomes crucial in the context of agile manufacturing systems. This work proposes a new middleware, denoted TalkRoBots, that has been recently patented [5]. It allows several industrial robots (ABB, Universal Robots, KUKA, etc. ), AGV and drones that support both open and proprietary robotic frameworks (ROS, ABB, etc.) to communicate, share information and cooperate in a transparent manner. Our technology allows robots to acquire information about the environment (temperature, light, humidity, video, sound, etc.) from ubiquitous sensors. TalkRoBots includes a Cloud server that allows operators to schedule dynamically the manufacturing scenarios, supervise their status, obtain access to sensors' data and re-configure a scenario when a fault occurs, for example, when using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) mechanism based on an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) [6]. Note here that once the scenario is launched, the robots will automatically handle their tasks in a fully distributed manner, without needing any exchange with the Cloud platform. The deployment of such technologies is easy and cost-efficient since it requires only the integration of an embedded PC into existing production systems.