From Transportation to Manipulation:
Transforming Magnetic Levitation to Magnetic Robotics
Lara Bergmann, Noah Greis, and Klaus Neumann
CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany
Fraunhofer IOSB-INA, Lemgo, Germany
Magnetic Levitation (MagLev) systems fundamentally increase the flexibility of in-machine material flow in industrial automation. Therefore, these systems enable dynamic throughput optimization, which is especially beneficial for high-mix low-volume manufacturing. Until now, MagLev installations have been used primarily for in-machine transport, while their potential for manipulation is largely unexplored. This paper introduces the 6D-Platform MagBot, a low-cost six degrees of freedom parallel kinematic that couples two movers into a composite robotic platform. Experiments show that the 6D-Platform MagBot achieves sub-millimeter positioning accuracy and supports fully autonomous pick up and drop off via a docking station, allowing rapid and repeatable reconfiguration of the machine. Relative to a single mover, the proposed platform substantially expands the reachable workspace, payload, and functional dexterity. By unifying transportation and manipulation, this work advances Magnetic Levitation towards Magnetic Robotics, enabling manufacturing solutions that are more agile, efficient, and adaptable.
To enable the development of motion planning approaches specifically designed for MagBots, a simulation of the 6D-Platform MagBot and the inverse kinematics controller are integrated in MagBotSim.
MagBotSim is designed specifically for Magnetic Robotics, based on MuJoCo, open-source, and can be installed via PIP. In addition, MagBotSim supports common reinforcement learning (RL) APIs (Gymnasium, PettingZoo).
Go to MagBotSim Documentation
Using our docking station, the 6D-Platform MagBot can be dropped off and picked up autonomously. Therefore, a machine can be easily reconfigured, which shortens changeovers: adapting to new products or variants becomes faster and requires less engineering time.
Since the 6D-Platform MagBot is designed for industrial use cases, we showcase an application example where the MagBot picks up a product and delivers it into a container. This task cannot be accomplished with a single mover due to the limited workspace.