Public supplementary material for the paper "Visualizing a control system for self-organizing production cells" (8th International Conference on Industry of the Future and Smart Manufacturing, Procedia Computer Science).
The paper presents a visualization approach for the HiFlex self-organizing multi-robot manufacturing cell. It combines two complementary, synchronized views: an assembly plan view that shows products, assembly step dependencies, and production progress, and a cell view that gives a two-dimensional, top-down representation of the cell with live information about robot teams and execution state.
These videos illustrate the visualization in use and accompany the paper:
- Demo video: https://drive.proton.me/urls/2S22ERFP5C#0cLsYsFn4JGq A live walkthrough of the assembly plan and cell views, showing how the self-organizing system forms teams and assembles products.
- Debug video: https://drive.proton.me/urls/PXG879H64W#CueLyaSZ2nDR The dockable debugging panels (state viewer, entity inspector, and the teams and components overviews) that expose the raw cell state during development.
This repo also ships a self-contained showcase build of the cell view of the visualization, so you can try it yourself. It runs entirely in your web browser, with no ROS, no backend, no compilation, and no installation required. The demo state is bundled into the page itself.
This repo contains everything you need:
start.sh: one-click launcher for Linux/macOSstart.bat: one-click launcher for Windowsviz_build_showcase/: the pre-built showcase (the app, its assets, and a small bundled web server)
- Python 3 (3.7 or newer), already present on most Linux/macOS systems. On Windows, install it from https://www.python.org/downloads/.
- A modern web browser (Chrome, Firefox, or Edge).
From the root of this repo, run the launcher for your system. It starts the server and opens your browser automatically.
Linux / macOS:
./start.shWindows: double-click start.bat, or from a terminal:
./start.batThe showcase opens at http://localhost:8000/index.html. Press Ctrl+C in the
terminal to stop the server.
Pass a port number to either launcher, e.g. ./start.sh 9000 or
start.bat 9000.
If you'd rather not use the launchers, run the bundled server directly:
python3 viz_build_showcase/serve_showcase.py # or add a port, e.g. 9000In that case you will have to manually open http://localhost:8000/index.html (or replace 8000 by the port you chose) in your browser.
- Blank page / missing images: Don't double-click
index.html, because browsers block local asset loading fromfile://URLs. Always start it with a launcher orpython3 serve_showcase.pyas shown above. - "Address already in use": Another process is using the port. Start on a
different one, e.g.
python3 serve_showcase.py 9001.