Forethought deployment of an industrial production system is a significant step towards improving economic benefit of an industrial company. The author proposes the procedure for finding an optimal specification of multirobot system, which considers it on the level of components of the robotic system. Components are grouped into mobile or stationary units of the system. A set of agents is considered as a solution for particular mission, it defines a specification of a heterogeneous multi-robot system. The paper presents the concept of the optimization procedure and describes the implementation of investment costs optimization step, which uses genetic algorithm.

In order to improve competitiveness in today’s business environment, farmers also have to think about the rapid technological development in their enterprises. The most important factor that can positively influence the progress of the agricultural sector is the application of modern, efficient and labour-saving technologies at the various stages of crop growing and processing. Introduction of robotics in the farming processes emerges as one of the options. Current state of technologies allows only a few tasks processed by robots to be technologically and economically viable; the most relevant example is lawn mowing robots. One of the issues that prevent widespread use of robots in agriculture is that there are still no regulations or standards in the robotic sector for the industry to allow each robot manufacturer to follow them, such as mountable equipment communication protocols, dimensions of chassis and body, control systems including sensors and actuators etc. Each robot developer chooses his own approach and interpretation in robot protocols and modules. This article presents a conceptual design of mobile robot “Formica 01” for various agricultural applications. A prototype of the proposed design has been developed and in the article various cases of its usage on strawberry fields have been described.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is relatively new software technology that is quickly being adopted by companies around the globe to free office workers from routine, monotonous and rule-based tasks letting them invest their time in higher complexity and value tasks. While big companies have money, time and workforce resources to implement RPA, small and medium enterprises (SME) fall behind in their effort to start using RPA despite the fact that for this segment of organizations RPA would be useful as it presents the opportunity to re-arrange their limited resources and delegate part of work to software. To address this situation, the aim of this paper is to conduct systematic review of literature regarding RPA appliances in enterprises in order to find out how to implement RPA successfully, what processes to give to RPA, and how SMEs can implement RPA better. During the review main guidelines on how to implement RPA in enterprise in general and which processes to delegate to RPA in particular were identified as well as challenges RPA implementation might bring to company. It was also noted that there is missing research on how to adopt RPA specifically in SMEs segment. The conclusion is that SMEs aimed RPA implementation guidelines are missing.