A Literature Survey on Reconfigurable Industrial Robotic Work Cells

Abstract

As the unpredictability of market needs and the mass customization trends increase, employing reconfigurable industrial robotic work cells becomes a viable solution for manufacturers. A reconfigurable manufacturing system is a system designed for a quick change in structure, both in hardware and software, in order to rapidly adjust production capacity and functionalities. However, the approach is quite general; a simple search within scientific literature, patent databases or the world-wide-web returns thousands of results, covering a time period from the 80s to date. Among the results, different approaches on reconfigurable industrial robotic work cell implementations can be easily noticed. This paper surveys the literature in reconfigurable industrial robotic work cells, aiming to identify, besides the most important approaches on this topic, also performance criteria associated to robotic workcell reconfigurability and means of measuring the reconfigurability degree of such cells. The survey also aims to identify command and control architectures used to achieve various levels of reconfigurability. The survey was conducted by using a specific search methodology, which is also presented in the paper.